Vale! J.G.S." I found myself smiling--I fear miserably--over this kind letter, especially at the wonder of my friend that I had not appealed to my relatives.

The only ones who would have liked to help me, if they had known I needed something, were my two little nieces who were in my own care; because my father, being but a poet, had no family, and my mother had lost hers, even her eldest son, by marrying my father.

After that they would have nothing to do with her, nor were they asked.

That rascally old Antonio was now the head of all the Caravacioli, as was I of my own outcast branch of our house--that is, of my two little nieces and myself.

It was partly of these poor infants I had thought when I took what was left of my small inheritance to Monte Carlo, hoping, since I seemed to be incapable of increasing it in any other way, that number seventeen and black would hand me over a fortune as a waiter does wine.
Alas! Luck is not always a fool's servant, and the kind of fortune she handed me was of that species the waiter brings you in the other bottle of champagne, the gold of a bubbling brain, lasting an hour.