He bowed politely and moved a step or two away.  But Zora, struck by a solution of the mystery which had not occurred to her, as one cannot grasp all the ways and customs of gaming establishments in ten minutes, rushed back to the other table.  She arrived just in time to hear the croupier asking whom the louis on seventeen belonged to.  The number had turned up again.

This time she brought the thirty-six louis to the stranger.

“Dear me,” said he, taking the money.  “It is very astonishing.  But why did you trouble?”

“Because I’m a woman of common sense, I suppose.”

He looked at the coins in his hand as if they were shells which a child at the seaside might have brought him, and then raised his eyes slowly to hers.

“You are a very gracious lady.”  His glance and tone checked an impulse of exasperation.  She smiled.

“At any rate, I’ve won fifty-six pounds for you, and you ought to be grateful.”

He made a little gesture of acknowledgement.  Had he been a more dashing gentleman he might have expressed his gratitude for the mere privilege of conversing with a gracious lady so beautiful.  They had drifted from the outskirts of the crowded table and found themselves in the thinner crowd of saunterers.  It was the height of the Monte Carlo season and the feathers and diamonds and rouge and greedy eyes and rusty bonnets of all nations confused the sight and paralyzed thought.  Yet among all the women of both worlds Zora Middlemist stood out remarkable.  As Septimus Dix afterwards explained, the rooms that evening contained a vague kind of conglomerate woman and Zora Middlemist.  And the herd of men envied the creature on whom she smiled so graciously.

She was dressed in black, as became a young widow, but it was a black which bore no sign of mourning.  The black, sweeping ostrich plume of a picture hat gave her an air of triumph.  Black gloves reaching more than halfway up shapely arms and a gleam of snowy neck above a black chiffon bodice disquieted the imagination.  She towered over her present companion, who was five foot seven and slimly built.

“You’ve brought me all this stuff, but what am I to do with it?” he asked helplessly.

“Perhaps I had better take care of it for you.”

It was a relief from the oppressive loneliness to talk to a human being; so she lingered wistfully in conversation.  A pathetic eagerness came into the man’s face.

“I wish you would,” said he, drawing a handful from his jacket pocket.  “I should be so much happier.”

“You can hardly be such a gambler,” she laughed.

“Oh, no!  It’s not that at all.  Gambling bores me.”

“Why do you play, then?”

“I don’t.  I staked that louis because I wanted to see whether I should be interested.  I wasn’t, as I began to think about the guns.  Have you had breakfast?”

Again Zora was startled.  A sane man does not talk of breakfasting at nine o’clock in the evening.  But if he were a lunatic perhaps it were wise to humor him.