CHAPTER XXIX CONTAINS THE CONCLUSION

My reader, I have throughout been perfectly frank with you—too frank, perhaps. But need I dwell further upon the stirring events of that night? It is assuredly sufficient to say that the persons arrested by the police numbered nearly forty, all of whom were charged with various offences, in addition to that of being found in an illicit gaming-house. Many of them, old offenders and desperate characters, notwithstanding the fact that they were outwardly respectable members of society, in due course received long periods of imprisonment, Vauquelin receiving a sentence of seven years. But Julie Fournereau, in view of the information she had given regarding poor Reggie's death, was dismissed with a fine of two thousand francs for carrying on the house in question. She has since disappeared into obscurity. Ulrica arrived in Paris next morning from Genoa, and was absolutely dumbfounded when we related the whole of the amazing story. That day, too, proved the happiest in all my life. Need I relate how, on the following morning, Ernest sought me and begged me to forgive? Or how, with tears of joy, I allowed him to hold me once more in his manly arms, as of old, and shower fervent kisses upon my face? No. If I were to begin to relate the joys that had now come to me, I should far exceed the space of a single volume. It is enough that you, reader, to whom I have made confession, should know that within a fortnight we all returned to London, and that while Ulrica became engaged to Gerald, and soon afterwards married him, with the old man's heartiest approval, Ernest again asked me to become his wife.

At Kensington Church, amid great éclat, within a month of our arrival back in town, my happiness broke into full flower.

Ulrica tells me, in the privacy of her little blue boudoir in Eaton Square, that she is no longer world-weary, living only for excitement, as in the fevered days gone by, but that her life is full of a peaceful happiness that cannot be surpassed. Nevertheless, I cannot really bring myself to believe that she is any happier than I am with Ernest in our pretty home at Hyde Park Gate, for the estrangement has rendered him all the more dear to me, and we are indeed supremely content in each other's perfect love.

Mrs. Thorne, poor Reggie's mother, has returned to Hampshire, fully satisfied at having cleared up the mystery surrounding her son's tragic death; while old Benjamin Keppel, late of Johannesburg, and now of Park Lane and Ulverton Towers, in Hertfordshire, still spends his winters in rather lonely grandeur in his great villa amid the palms outside Nice, working in secret at his ivory-turning, and giving at intervals those princely entertainments for which he has become so famous in the cosmopolitan society which suns itself upon the Riviera.

As for Ernest and myself, we have not visited Nice since. We prefer Cairo for the winter, with a trip up to Luxor and Assouan, for we retain a far too vivid recollection of those dark days of doubt, desperation and despair, when it was our strange and tragic lot to be so darkly associated with The Gamblers.

THE END

Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey.