and kissed him in the frankest, simplest manner possible on the
forehead. "Viens," she whispered, "je m'etouffe ici, il fait si
frais dehors; sortons." He did not answer; his eyes were on the
cards. "Rouge perd, et la couleur," said the hard official voice.

With a sigh, he rose, coughed, passed his hand over his eyes, and
took his wife's arm.--(I felt sure she was his wife.) They passed
slowly through the rooms together, and I lost sight of them. But
not of his face--nor of hers. Sitting by the fountain outside the
gaming saloons half an hour afterwards, I fell to musing about this
strange couple. So young,--she scarcely more than a child, and
he so ill and wasted! He had played with the manner of an old
habitue, and she seemed used to finding him at the tables and
leading him away. I made up my mind that I had stumbled on a
romance, and resolved to hunt it down. At the table d'hote dinner
in my hotel that evening I met a friend from Nice to whom I confided
my curiosity. "I know," said he, "the young people of whom you
speak; they are patients of Dr S. of Monaco, one of my most
intimate acquaintances. He told me their story." "They," I
interpolated,--" is the wife, then, also ill?" My friend smiled
a little. "Not ill exactly, perhaps," he answered. "But you must
have seen,--she will very shortly be a mother. And she is very
young and delicate." "Tell me their story," I said, "since you
know it. It is romantic, I am certain." "It is sad," he said,
"and sadness suffices, I suppose, to constitute romance. The young
man's name is Georges Saint-Cyr, and his family were `poor relations'
of an aristocratic house. I say `were,' because they are all dead,--
his father, mother, and three sisters. The father died of tubercle,
so did his daughters; the son, you see, inherits the same disease
and will also die of it at no very distant time. Georges Saint-Cyr