We supped in one of the restaurants in the Casino, and I was assailed with questions. Why had I not been seen here before? or was it that I played at other tables only? What was the largest sum I had ever won? and what did I really entre amis—(was not that gratifying!)—think about number thirteen? It was in vain that I pleaded I was no gambler, that I had no ideas whatever about the number thirteen, except that when thirteen sat down to dinner they usually all lived for more than a year afterwards. I was listened to with polite incredulity. I had not known that crowned heads were so slow of belief. Princess Sophia, I think, alone credited me with speaking the truth, for she said (and subsequently explained what she meant):
‘At first I thought that you were like poor Petros, when he said that he was but a beginner at bezique, but I think I was wrong.’
After an interval of half an hour we went back to the tables. If I had been lucky before, I was Luck incarnate now. The thing was absurd and ridiculous. I won so regularly that it became almost monotonous. For more than an hour I consistently played limit stakes, and still the rouleaux of gold poured in. I had recovered my nerve, and did not again put on the large eights, which fitted me exactly, and from opposite I saw the Princess looking at me with a wistful air.
‘It reminds me so of a night I spent with poor Leonard,’ she said, half to herself, as for the hundredth time her stake was swept away to join my winnings.
We left the tables at half-past three, and though I had meant to stop at Monte Carlo only one night more, I found it impossible to go. In fact, I engaged myself to lunch at the Princess’s villa next day, and be of her party again in the evening.
The details of the play during the next few evenings would be tedious to relate. It will suffice to say that Luck turned her back on me, and though she could not quite efface the result of her first favours, I am still not in a position to play roulette for large sums. In fact, I have only introduced this little episode to explain how it was that I became acquainted with the Princess, who told me the afore-written history of her life, and graciously suggested that I should make a little book of it.
‘For, indeed,’ she said, ‘my adventures seem to me not uninteresting. Perhaps that is only my egotism, but I do not think so. And as you are going away to-morrow—to Greece, I think you said?—I will finish the story of which I have told you a part, and mention what happened to Leonard after that memorable night at Monte Carlo when I gambled for Rhodopé and lost.’
She sighed.
‘Poor dear Leonard!’ she said; ‘that was his tour de force, his fine moment. He never came near it again. It is sad to me to think what a mess people make of their lives. Some are born to one thing, some to another; he was certainly born to be a gambler, but an adverse fate, like the seventh godmother in the fairy-tales, gave him a terrible gift. She made him Prince of Rhodopé, and endowed him with a mania for reformation. I call him Luther sometimes.’
‘But surely you can hardly regret what he has done!’ I said. ‘Has he not made a power of Rhodopé?’