“I am trying to understand the game,” he replied.
“Have you never been in Monaco?” I enquired.
“Never,” he said.
I explained the points in the game to him, but he did not appear to take any interest in it.
“What game do you play?” I asked.
“Cribbage,” he replied, “or ecartè, or all fours, or euchre, or poker. I have been in America.”
I proposed ecartè to him, and we sat down to a modest game. I offered to play for high stakes; he declined; and at the end of an hour I had won some fifteen pounds of him. Then we rose from our table, and watched the roulette players; but I was more employed in watching him than the turning of the wheel. He threw an occasional sovereign down, almost chancing where it fell, and he lost with a good grace. Others were staking their tens and fifties. Fifty was the limit; but he never exceeded his sovereign.
“It is enough to lose at a time,” he said.
In the course of the night I calculated that he had lost about fifty pounds. He was one of the first to leave, and he scarcely touched ‘our Queen’s’ hand as he bade her good night, and asked permission to come again. A permission graciously given.
Now, the suspicion I had entertained towards him lessened when I considered how he had conducted himself, and but for a chance remark made by Sydney, and the incidents that followed, I should have accused myself of injustice.