He had, we found, won over sixty thousand francs.
At his invitation we went along to Gast's, the jeweller's, in the Galerie, and he there purchased for each of us a ring as a little souvenir of the day. Then we entered Giro's and dined.
Yes, life at Monte Carlo is absolutely intoxicating. Now, however, that I sit here calmly reflecting on the events of that day when I first entered the Sign of the Seven Sins, I find that even though the display of such wealth as one sees upon the tables is dazzling, yet my first impression of it has never been altered.
I hated Monte Carlo from the first. I hate it now.
The talk at dinner was, of course, the argot of the Rooms. At Monte Carlo the conversation is always of play. If you meet an acquaintance, you do not ask after her health, but of her luck and her latest successes.
The two bejewelled worlds, the monde and the demi-monde, ate, drank, and chattered in that restaurant of wide renown. The company was cosmopolitan, the conversation polyglot, the dishes marvellous. At the table next us there sat the Grand-Duke Michael of Russia, with the Countess Torby, and beyond a British earl with a couple of smart military men. The United States Ambassador to Germany was at another table with a small party of friends; while La Juniori, Derval, and several other well-known Parisian beauties were scattered here and there.
I was laughing at a joke of Reggie's, when suddenly I raised my eyes and saw a pair of new-comers. The man was tall, dark, handsome, with face a trifle bronzed—a face I knew only too well!
I started, and must have turned pale, for I knew from Ulrica's expression that she noticed it.
The man who entered there, as though to taunt me with his presence, was Ernest Cameron, the man whom I had loved—nay, whom I still loved—the man who had a year ago cast me aside for another and left me to wear out my young heart in sorrow and suffering.
That woman was with him—the tow-haired woman whom they told me he had promised to make his wife. I had never seen her before. She was rather petite, with a fair, fluffy coiffure, blue-grey eyes and pink-and-white cheeks. She had earned, I afterwards discovered, a rather unenviable notoriety in Paris on account of some scandal or other, but the real truth about it I could never ascertain.