The hand of the croupier was perhaps a shade less steady than usual as he picked up the marble and started it on its run. It spun, faltered, rattled, clicked....
“The twenty-seven,” announced the croupier. “Red, odd and low.”
The prince had won six thousand and lost twenty-four. Imperturbably he placed his bets again. It was at this moment that Selden entered the room.
The prince’s abrupt departure had left a constraint upon the dinner-party, which was not to be shaken off. They had gone from the dining-room into the salon, and there, after one or two ineffectual attempts at gaiety, Davis and his fiancée had withdrawn to a corner sofa to discuss certain strictly intimate affairs, and Selden had smoked a cigarette with Madame Ghita and talked of desultory and unimportant things—of anything, indeed, except the one thing which had been in his mind to say when he was buying the roses.
Impossible to say that now—impossible even to hint at it. It would be indecent—like wooing a woman whose husband was dying in the next room! Besides, she was in no mood for such confidences; she was distrait and sad. The conversation faltered and died away; and presently he summoned up courage to take his departure. She had been obviously grateful that he should go.
He was too depressed and agitated to think of sleep, so he slipped into his coat, left the hotel and descended to the terrace, just as the prince had done half an hour before.
The rain-squall earlier in the evening had swept the terrace bare, and he found himself alone there, except for the gardien. Masses of slaty clouds were fleeing across the sky before the gusty wind, with the moon peeping between them now and then and sending fugitive gleams of light over the white-capped waves, which hissed and moaned dolefully as they were driven in upon the rocky shore. More doleful still was the rustle of the palms and the clatter of the rubber trees flapping in the wind like a flock of ghostly night-birds. And above him gleamed the lights of the casino, standing like a courtesan, white and gilt and laboriously gay, but at heart most dismal of all!
Selden gave himself up for a time to the luxury of self-pity—to that most dangerous of all dissipations, a fit of the blues. What was the use of going on? What was the use of having ideals or of fighting for them? The world paid no heed. What, indeed, was the world but a huge casino, where every one was struggling to win his neighbour’s gold?
Why, above all, should he worry himself about a woman who was sad because another man was leaving her?