"
"Then you mean to live there?"
"For a while at all events. Perhaps not long. Who knows what one may do?
But I shall have the pleasure of knowing it's mine."
Dick, though interested, had fallen into absent-mindedness. Two or three
persons having slipped away, he was able to get nearer the table, and to
see more clearly what Mary was doing. It almost seemed that if he and
Hannaford concentrated their whole minds upon willing her to stop play
for the night, she must feel the influence. Her luck was out, certainly.
She had lost a great deal, but she had a goodly store of winnings to
fall back upon.
"Let's will her hard, to leave off," he suggested, half ashamed of the
proposal, yet secretly in earnest.
Hannaford smiled indulgence. "All right," he said. "Here goes!"
Vanno Della Robbia less deliberately yet with more ardour had thrown
himself into the same experiment. He thought that Mary's anger against
him might have one good result: in making her wish to leave the table
where he had come to sit. She could scarcely fall upon worse luck
elsewhere, and perhaps she might give up play for the evening if she
went away from this unlucky corner. If a wish of his could be granted by
fate, she would never play again. Yet, desiring this with all the force
that was in him, he began nevertheless to gamble, for the first time
since coming to Monte Carlo. No conscientious scruple had held him back
hitherto; but the game had not appealed to him. He disliked the
crowding, the sordidness and vulgarity which, to his mind, attended it;
and it seemed to him that public gambling was an unintelligent, greedy
vice.
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