The one man in the crowded halls of that palace—the one and only man—who could control Fortune herself, he sat there outwardly cold and impassive, while his mind and nerves were torn and wrenched as by opposing forces.
He was now more than five hundred pounds to the good, and as yet he had only played one coup of the many agreed upon by the secret code.
Already the people at the table were glancing at each other and at the impassive young man who staked a maximum each time, and had already won twice en plein—so unprecedented a thing to do.
He was a Russian prince, it was whispered. His French was so perfect—though it was not absolutely the French of a Frenchman—that the whispering people round the table thought he could be none other than a Russian. That he was English never occurred to anyone, for no Englishman speaks French as Basil Gregory spoke it.
The wheel was turning again, and everyone watched to see what the unperturbed figure by the croupier would do.
This time, with a glance at his cypher card, and also at his watch, Basil backed red and not a number.
Each number in the wheel has its corresponding colour, red or black, and it was as easy for him to win on an even chance as it was upon a chance of thirty-five to one. He backed red, and, far away at the top of the Hôtel Malmaison, Emile Deschamps pressed the key which magnetised the slot 18 in the wheel upon the green table—18 being a red number.
Basil placed the maximum upon red—that is, two hundred and forty pounds.
Red turned up. He had now won nearly eight hundred pounds, and round his chair were grouped a crowd of people three feet deep.