"I was warned. My father just before he died wrote me a letter saying there was 'gambler's blood' in my veins. Those words always run in my head now. And a friend who loves me begged me not to come to Monte Carlo."
"It was Fate brought you—to give you to me. Do you regret it?"
"I don't regret anything—if you don't; because what is past—for both of us—doesn't feel real. This is the only real part. We were brought to Monte Carlo for this, it seems now."
"It seems, and it is."
They looked with one accord down at the Casino far below, which from the curé's garden had more than ever the semblance of a large, crouching animal. Its four horns glittered in the beginning of sunset, as if they were crusted with jewels of different colours. Its dominance over all that surrounded it, all that was smaller and less powerful and impressive than itself, was astonishingly evident from this bird's-eye point of view; but brightly as the jewels gleamed, they had lost their allurement for these two. With Vanno's arms around her, Mary wondered how she could ever have felt that the Casino was a vast magnet compelling her to come to it in spite of herself, drawing her thoughts and her money to itself, as an immense magnetic rock might draw the nails from the sides of a frail little boat. With Mary's fingers warm and soft as rose-petals against his neck, her cheek on his, Vanno could have laughed with contemptuous pity at the wretched image of himself which he seemed to see down below, stupidly hurrying along with an offering for the Casino. He was not so much shocked at his own yielding to the attraction as he was surprised that there could have been so strong an attraction.
"Doesn't it look stupid down there?" Mary asked, almost in a whisper. "Like a lot of toy houses for children to play with?"
"And the children are tired of playing with them!" Vanno answered. "The toys there were only worth playing with when there was nothing better to do."
"That's it!" she echoed. "When there was nothing better to do. I think that was what the curé must have meant."
"The curé!" Vanno echoed. "I'd forgotten him!"
"So had I. How ungrateful of us. But you have made me forget everything except—you."