"Nancy," he said. "Tesoro mio! My treasure!..."
But Nancy ignored the eyes and the outstretched hand. "Who is she?"
"She is nobody—absolutely nobody! An old thing with a yellow wig. Her name is Doyle. How can you go on like that, my love?"
But Nancy could go on, and did. "She is English?"
"No, no; American. A weird old thing from the prairies." And Aldo laughed loudly, but alone.
"Well?" said Nancy, with tight lips, when Aldo had quite finished laughing.
"Well, Grimaux, who has been here sixteen years, said to me: 'The mistake everyone makes is to double on their losses. When you lose——'"
Aldo's slim hands waved, his shoulders shrugged, his long eyes turned upward. Nancy watched him, cold and detached. "He looks like the oyster-sellers of Santa Lucia!" she said to herself. "How could I ever think him beautiful?" Then she saw Anne-Marie in the garden kissing the Condamine doll, and she forgave him.
"When you lose," Aldo was saying, "you run after your losses—you double, you treble, you go on, et voilà! la débâcle—whereas when you win you go carefully, staking little stakes, satisfied with a louis at a time, and when you have won one hundred francs, out you go, saying: 'That is enough for to-day!' Now that is wrong, quite wrong. What you ought to do is to follow up your wins, so that when the streak of luck does come—"
"I have heard quite enough about that," said Nancy. "Tell me the rest."