A gold piece! It was several days of rest and riches for the beggar, and Lucien was on the point of waking her to tell her this, when he heard near his ear, as in an hallucination, a voice—the voice of the Pole, with its coarse drawling accent, almost whispering: "It's now two days since I stirred out of the club, and for two days the 'seventeen' has never turned up; I'll suffer my hand to be cut off, if that number does not turn up on the stroke of midnight."
"HE STOLE THE GOLD PIECE FROM THE FALLEN SHOE!"
Then this young man of three-and-twenty, descended from a race of honest men, who bore a proud military name, and who had never swerved from the path of honour, conceived a frightful idea; he was seized with a mad, hysterical, monstrous desire. After glancing on all sides, to make sure that he was alone in the deserted street, he bent his knee, and carefully out-stretching his trembling hand, he stole the gold piece from the fallen shoe!
Hurrying then, with all his speed, he returned to the gambling-house, scaled the stairs two and three at a stride, and entering the accursed play-room as the first stroke of midnight was sounding, placed the piece of gold on the green cloth, and cried:—
"I stake on the seventeen!"
The seventeen won.
With a turn of the hand Lucien pushed the thirty-six louis on to the "red."
The "red" won.
He left the seventy-two louis on the same colour; the "red" again won.