The Sign of the Seven Sins Author:William Le Queux General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1900 Original Publisher: Lippincott Subjects: Detective and mystery stories English fiction Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you g... more »et free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. IS A MYSTERY I Was left alone with Reggie, for Ulrica had taken Gerald in to the orchestral concert. " What awfully good luck you had!" he observed after we had been chatting some time. " If you'd had the maximum on each time you'd have won about four thousand dollars." " There are a good many if's in gambling," I remarked. " I've never had any luck before in gambles at bazaars and such-like places." " When you do have luck, follow it, is my motto," he laughed. " I should have advised you to continue playing to-day, only I thought it might annoy Ulrica," and he raised his glass to his lips. " But I might have lost all that I won," I remarked. " No, I prefer to keep it. I'd like to be unique among the people and go away with some of the bank's money. I intend to keep what I have, and not to play again." "Never?" "Never!" " My dear Miss Rosselli, that's what everyone says here," he laughed. " But before you've been on the Riviera long you'll discover that this is no place for good resolutions. Gambling is one of the sweetest and most insidious of vices, and has the additional attraction of being thought chic. Look at the crowd of women here! Why, every one of them play. If they didn't, others would believe them to be hard up -- and poverty, you know, is distinctly bad form here. Even if a woman hasn't sufficient to pay her hotel bill she must wear the regulation gold chatelaine, -- the gold chain-purse, -- if it only contains a couple of pieces of a hundred sous. And she must play. Fortunes have ...« less