"It has been months, maybe years, since I've eaten as I have to-day, and I've sat at the tables of all the big hotels on the Riviera. I had ceased to believe that such chicken as you have just served existed in the world any longer. I imagined they were dream birds, mythological fowl."
The Colonel smiled, bowing as if that were a tribute to him.
"And you, Spadoni?" the Prince went on inquiringly. "How are you enjoying life?"
"Your Highness—I—I," stammered the musician, at the sudden question.
Castro intervened, coming to his rescue.
"Our friend Spadoni can always get a free meal at the villas of a number of invalid ladies, who live at Cap-Martin and who are mad about music. Besides some English people at Nice often invite him. He doesn't need to bother about paying hotel bills either. He has at his disposal a whole big villa, large and well-furnished: it goes with his job, as watchman over a corpse."
Novoa started with surprise at the news.
"Don't be astonished," continued Atilio. "He has the benefit of a magnificent house in exchange for looking after a tomb."
"Oh, Professor!... Don't mind him," groaned the musician with the air of a martyr.
"But with all these advantages," Castro went on saying, "there is one terrible drawback: he is a worse gambler than I. He has a nickname in the Casino 'the number five gentleman.' He never plays any other number. Anything he can get hold of he puts on five, and loses it. I am the 'number seventeen gentleman' and it turns out as badly with me as with him.... Besides, he has his English friends. Queer ducks! They come from Nice every day in a two horse landau, and just as if they didn't get enough gambling with the Casino, they set up a green table on their knees and take out a deck of cards. They play poker with the Corniche landscape, that people come from all over the world to see, right before their eyes. And our artist, when he takes a fourth hand with the two Englishmen and an old maid, there within the sight of the Mediterranean, golden in the setting sun, loses everything he took in at some concert at Cannes or Monte Carlo."