“Do you know her, mamma?” asked Florence.

“I did see her once; but I cannot say that I know her.  She used to be a very handsome woman, and looks to be quite good-natured; but Sir Magnus has always lived abroad, and except when he came home about your poor father’s death I have seen very little of him.”

“I never saw him but that once,” said Florence.

And so it was settled that she and her mother were to spend a month at Brussels.

CHAPTER XI.

Monte Carlo.

Toward the end of September, while the weather was so hot as to keep away from the south of France all but very determined travellers, an English gentleman, not very beautiful in his outward appearance, was sauntering about the great hall of the gambling-house at Monte Carlo, in the kingdom or principality of Monaco, the only gambling-house now left in Europe in which idle men of a speculative nature may yet solace their hours with some excitement.  Nor is the amusement denied to idle ladies, as might be seen by two or three highly-dressed habituees who at this moment were depositing their shawls and parasols with the porters.  The clock was on the stroke of eleven, when the gambling-room would be open, and the amusement was too rich in its nature to allow of the loss of even a few minutes.  But this gentleman was not an habitue, nor was he known even by name to any of the small crowd that was then assembled.  But it was known to many of them that he had had a great “turn of luck” on the preceding day, and had walked off from the “rouge-et-noir” table with four or five hundred pounds.

The weather was still so hot that but few Englishmen were there, and the play had not as yet begun to run high.  There were only two or three,—­men who cannot keep their hands from ruin when ruin is open to them.  To them heat and cold, the dog-star or twenty degrees below zero, make no difference while the croupier is there, with his rouleaux before him, capable of turning up the card.  They know that the chance is against them,—­one in twenty, let us say,—­and that in the long-run one in twenty is as good as two to one to effect their ruin.  For a day they may stand against one in twenty, as this man had done.  For two or three days, for a week, they may possibly do so; but they know that the doom must come at last,—­as it does come invariably,—­and they go on.  But our friend, the Englishman who had won the money, was not such a one as these, at any rate in regard to Monaco.  Yesterday had been his first appearance, and he had broken ground there with great success.  He was an ill-looking person, poorly clad,—­what, in common parlance, we should call seedy.  He had not a scrap of beard on his face, and though swarthy and dark as to his countenance, was light as to his hair, which hung in quantities down his back.  He was dressed from head to foot in a suit of cross-barred, light-colored tweed, of which he wore the coat buttoned tight over his chest, as though to hide some deficiency of linen.