enough to his ears; a sound that he--who had been all over the world more than once as a sailor--had heard in diverse places. In Port Said to wit, in Shanghai, San Francisco, Lisbon, and Monte Carlo. The hum of a wheel, the click and rattle of a ball against brass, and then a soft voice--surely it was a woman's!--murmuring a number, a colour, a chance!

"So, so!" said Julian to himself, "Madame la Roulette, and here, too. Ah! well, madame is everywhere; why shouldn't she favour this place as well as all others that she can force her way into?"

Then he pushed open a swing door to his right, a door covered with cocoanut matting nailed on to it, perhaps to keep the place cool, perhaps to deaden sound--the sound of Madame la Roulette's clicking jaws--though surely this was scarcely necessary in such an out-of-the-way spot, and entered the room whence the noise proceeded.

The place was darkened by matting and Persians; again, perhaps, to exclude the heat or deaden sound; and was, indeed, so dark that, until his eyes became accustomed to the dull gloom of the room--vast and sparsely furnished--he could scarcely discern what was in it. He was, however, able to perceive the forms of four or five men seated round a table, to see coins glittering on it; and a girl at the head of the table (so dark that, doubtless, she was of usual mixed Spanish and Indian blood common to the colony) who was acting as croupier--a girl in whose hair was an oleander flower that gleamed like a star in the general duskiness of her surroundings. While, as he gazed, she twirled the wheel, murmuring softly: "Plank it down before it is too late," as well as, "Make your game," and spun the ball; while, a moment later, she flung out pieces of gold and silver to right and left of her and raked in similar pieces, also from right and left of her.

But the sordid, dusty room, across which the motes glanced in the single ray of sunshine that stole in and streamed across the table, was not--it need scarcely be said--a prototype of the gilded palace that smiles over the blue waters of the Mediterranean, nor of the great gambling chambers in the ancient streets behind the Cathedral in Lisbon, nor of the white and airy saloons of San Francisco--instead, it was mean, dusty, and dirty, while over it there was the fœtid, sickly, tropical atmosphere that pervades places to which neither light nor constant air is often admitted.

Himself unseen for the moment--since, as he entered the room, a wrangle had suddenly sprung up among all at the table over the disputed 

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