He had advertised himself, and almost believed in himself,
as "_le roi de la roulette_," who for payment of two louis would impart
to any one the secret of unlimited wealth. Ignoring failure, pursuing
success, his own tiny fortune, his wife's youth, had gone. And as his
body went to the grave the whole record of his life--thousands of
roulette cards in neat packets, innumerable notebooks containing the
great secret--lay waiting for the dustman. The man's wife in preparing
to leave Monte Carlo forever had turned all his treasures out of the
trunks where through years they had accumulated, and had them flung into
a huge dust bin kept for the waste things of the hotel kitchen. This
George Winter knew, for the woman had boasted bitterly of the last
revenge she meant to take. "'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' Let all be
swept away and forgotten," she had said; and the words haunted the
chaplain, mourning through his brain like the voice of the tideless sea
that moaned ceaselessly under his study window.
He longed to go back to Rose and be cheered by her into hopefulness, to
have her assure him in her warm, loving way that he was doing some good
in this strange place of brilliant gayety and black tragedy; that his
work was not all in vain, though so often he likened it to the task of
Sisyphus. But he found Dick Carleton with Rose, and their faces told him
that there was no hope of comfort.
"Oh, St. George, poor Captain Hannaford is dead!" were Rose's first
words as her husband came into the drawing-room.
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