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darling?’
    â€˜Madam, there is.’ I looked up from my cooling coffee and saw a small man in frayed and dapper clothes with co-respondent shoes. His nose seemed bigger than the rest of his face: the experience of a lifetime had swollen the veins and bleared the eyes. He carried jauntily under his arm a walking stick that had lost its ferrule, with a duck’s head for a handle. He said with blurred courtesy, ‘I think I am unpardonably intruding, but you have had ill-success at the tables and I carry with me good tidings, sir and madam.’
    â€˜Well,’ Cary said, ‘we were just going . . .’ She told me later that his use of a biblical phrase gave her a touch of shivers, of diablerie – the devil at his old game of quoting scripture.
    â€˜It is better for you to stay, for I have shut in my mind here a perfect system. That system I am prepared to let you have for a mere ten thousand francs.’
    â€˜You are asking the earth.’ I said. ‘We haven’t got that much.’
    â€˜But you are staying at the Hôtel de Paris. I have seen you.’
    â€˜It’s a matter of currency,’ Cary said quickly. ‘You know how it is with the English.’
    â€˜One thousand francs.’
    â€˜No,’ Cary said, ‘I’m sorry.’
    â€˜I tell you what I’ll do,’ I said, ‘I’ll stand you a drink for it.’
    â€˜Whisky,’ the little man replied sharply. I realized too late that whisky cost 500 francs. He sat down at the table with his stick between his knees so that the duck seemed to be sharing his drink. I said, ‘Go on.’
    â€˜It is a very small whisky.’
    â€˜You won’t get another.’
    â€˜It is very simple,’ the little man said, ‘like all great mathematical discoveries. You bet first on one number and when your number wins you stake your gains on the correct transversal of six numbers. The correct transversal on one is 31 to 36; on two 13 to 18; on three . . .’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜You can take it that I am right. I have studied very carefully here for many years. For five hundred francs I will sell you a list of all the winning numbers which came up last June.’
    â€˜But suppose the number doesn’t come up?’
    â€˜You wait to start the system until it does.’
    â€˜It might take years.’
    The little man got up, bowed and said, ‘That is why one must have capital. I had too little capital. If instead of five million I had possessed ten million I would not be selling you my system for a glass of whisky.’
    He retired with dignity, the ferruleless stick padding on the polished floor, the duck staring back at us as though it wanted to stay.
    â€˜I think my system’s better,’ Cary said. ‘If that woman can get away with it, I can . . .’
    â€˜It’s begging. I don’t like my wife to beg.’
    â€˜I’m only a new wife. And I don’t count it begging – it’s not money, only tokens.’
    â€˜You know there was something that man said which made me think. It’s a pure matter of reducing what one loses and increasing what one gains.’
    â€˜Yes, darling. But in my system I don’t lose anything.’
    She was away for nearly half an hour and then she came back almost at a run. ‘Darling, put away your doodles. I want to go home.’
    â€˜They aren’t doodles. I’m working out an idea.’
    â€˜Darling, please come at once or I’m going to cry.’
    When we were outside she dragged me up through the gardens, between the floodlit palm trees and the flower-beds like sugar sweets. She said, ‘Darling, it was a terrible failure.’
    â€˜What happened?’
    â€˜I did exactly what that woman did. I waited till someone won a lot of money and then I sort of nudged his elbow and said, “Give.” But he didn’t give, he said quite