'Say a number,' whispered Cosette. 'Shut the eyes and say a number.'
'Twenty-four,' said Henry. She had told him it was her age.
'_Bien! Voilà huit louis!_' she exclaimed, opening her purse of netted gold; and he took the eight coins and put them on number twenty-four. Eight notes for a thousand francs each remained on the even numbers. The other notes were in Henry's hip-pocket, a crushed mass.
Twenty-four won. It was nothing but black that morning. '_Mais c'est épatant!_' murmured several on lookers anxiously.
A croupier counted out innumerable notes, and sundry noble and glorious gold _plaques_ of a hundred francs each. Henry could not check the totals, but he knew vaguely that another three hundred pounds or so had accrued to him, on behalf of Cosette.
And feeling a terrible habitué, he said to the croupier in French: '_Maximum. Rouge._'
'_Maximum. Rouge_,' repeated the croupier.
Instantly the red enclosure was covered with the stakes of a quantity of persons who had determined to partake of Henry's luck.
Henry was so absorbed that he did not observe a colloquy between two of the croupiers at the middle of the table. The bank was broken, and every soul in every room knew it in the fraction of a second.
'Come,' said Cosette, as soon as Henry had received the winnings. 'Come,' she repeated, pulling his sleeve nervously.
'I've broken the bank at Monte Carlo!' he thought as they hurried out of the luxurious halls. 'I've broken the bank at Monte Carlo! I've broken the bank at Monte Carlo!'
If he had succeeded to the imperial throne of China, he would have felt much the same as he felt then.
Quite by chance he remembered the magazine article, and a statement therein that prudent people, when they had won a large sum, drove straight to Smith's Bank and banked it _coram publico_, so that scoundrels might be aware that assault with violence in the night hours would be futile.
'If we lunch?' Cosette suggested, while Henry was getting his hat.
At Smith's Bank he found that he had sixty-three thousand francs of hers.
'You dear,' she murmured in ecstasy, and actually pressed a light kiss on his ear in the presence of the bank clerk! 'You let me keep the three thousand?' she pleaded, like a charming child.