little further yet. Heads are craned forward. Lucy Warrender clutches the key of her bedroom tighter than ever. And then the bald-headed high priest of Baal calls out in the regulation monotone, "Vingt-sept. Rouge Impair et Passe!" Rhadamanthus, Minos and Æacus stretch out their rakes, and gold, notes, and fat five-franc pieces, which have been staked by the unhappy backers of black, even, the zero and the various numbers (all but twenty-seven, lucky twenty-seven) are swept away in an instant. Then the croupiers cover the stakes of the lucky backers of odd and red with their equivalents; nothing remains on the table now but fortunate Lucy's five Napoleons. The croupier at her side gives it the little professional knock with his rake, sweeps the five Napoleons back towards Miss Warrender, and counts out to her from his cash-box, with unerring rapidity, the sum of three thousand five hundred francs in notes. There is a little hum of applause. "Faites vos jeux, messieurs." Down rained the notes, the Napoleons, the British sovereigns and the five-franc pieces, and the game continues with monotonous regularity.

For three mortal hours Lucy Warrender clutched her hotel key, and played with varying success. At one time there was quite a little heap of notes and gold in front of her, upon which she discreetly laid her fan. She had steadily backed the number twenty-seven for varying but ever increasing amounts. The number twenty-seven had come up no less than eight times and had been the cause of Miss Warrender's winning heavily. The keenest eye at that time could have detected no wrinkle on Lucy's lovely girlish face. But fortune after a while ceased to favour her; the crowd of admiring onlookers, "the gallery," that had stood behind her chair attracted by her successes gradually dwindled, and the heap of gold and notes in front of her slowly but surely took unto themselves wings and flew away. But the gouty old Frenchman, the Duc de la Houspignolle, faithful knight that he was, still stood behind her chair. Old Pepper and the veteran Colonel Spurbox, of the Carabineers, still leered at her, in mingled pity and admiration, from the other side of the great roulette table. Lucy Warrender still clutched her key, and still backed fatal number twenty-seven; her mouth was dry and parched as she took out her last thousand-franc note, and, it not being permitted to stake that sum at roulette, she took it to the Trente et Quarante table, and lost it at a single coup.

The lady had played her last stake and lost it. She rose to leave.

"Let me be your banker, dear Miss Warrender," whispered the aged Mephistopheles who stood behind her chair.

"No, duke, not that. I haven't quite sunk to that yet, you know."

"Always farouche, dear Miss Warrender, but I apologize," he continued as he gave her his arm.

Perhaps the little hand that rested on it trembled slightly, but Lucy was a Warrender, and plucky; she nodded and bowed in every direction; she smiled and simpered as sweetly as of yore; she sat in the great restaurant at one of the little marble tables and sucked an orangeade glacée through two straws, and then the Duc de la Houspignolle escorted her back to the Hotel de Russie with all respect, where Fanchette anxiously awaited her arrival.

Fanchette didn't ask her mistress how she had prospered, for her gesture as she flaccidly dropped into her lounge-chair told the woman all she wished to know.

"You can go, Fanchette," said Lucy; "if I want anything I'll touch the hand-bell."

The woman yawned, courtesied and departed.

Lucy Warrender opened her writing-case and commenced an affectionate letter to her uncle. In it she said incidentally:

"There are quite a number of people here that we know. The old Duc de la Houspignolle, still quite the old beau; and that dreadful old General Pepper, the man we met at Rome, and who was mixed up in Reginald's affair with poor Barbiche, and Colonel Spurbox. They talk of making up a party to run across to Nice. I think of joining them. If we go we shall leave the day after to-morrow; everything of course depends upon the weather. I——"

Here Lucy Warrender deliberately let her pen fall upon the paper. Then she got up, looked at herself in the glass and frowned; and then she did a thing she hadn't done for years. She knelt down at her bed-side and said her prayer to heaven, the very prayer she had been accustomed to say as a little child upon her nurse's lap. Then she took a printed receipt of the Mont de Piété for a pair of brilliant solitaire earrings, and burnt it in the flame of the candle.

"No one will miss me," she muttered to herself, "no one, save Maurice Capt, for I have been an income to him, and Georgie, perhaps. Poor Georgie!" she added with a sigh. She never even thought of Lucius; she knew full well that even had the youth known she was his mother, he would assuredly not have missed her.

"I wonder whether the old duke will be there," she continued to herself; "all the English are sure to come. We never miss a funeral; it's one of our sad pleasures," she added with a hollow laugh. Then she took from her dressing-case a dark blue fluted medicine bottle; it was labelled, "The sedative mixture, a teaspoonful for a dose at bedtime. POISON." The last word had a little special red label all to itself. The bottle was nearly full. Miss Warrender deliberately poured out seven-eighths of its contents into a tumbler, then she recorked the bottle, replaced it in her dressing-case and swallowed the contents of the tumbler at a draught, and then carefully and deliberately washed the glass and dried it with the towel. Then she sat herself down in the lounge-chair. In ten minutes she dozed; she soon slept peacefully and calmly. In half-an-hour she had ceased to exist.

"On the 23rd inst., at the Hotel de Russie, Monte Carlo, Lucy, the only daughter of the late Colonel George Warrender, of the H. E. I. C. Service, aged 35, suddenly of heart-disease."

This was the first intimation to Lucy Warrender's friends in London of her sudden death.

"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Charmington, now quite the old woman, "I wonder how she managed that lovely-coloured hair."