“Yours will be, I dare say. Mine will be regulated by Uncle Philip, presumably.” His mouth twitched in a brief sneer. “It rather strikes me we make each other’s lives.” Then, as though trying to turn the conversation into a more impersonal channel: “Rum crowd here to-night, isn’t it? See that woman sitting on your left? She looks as though she hadn’t two sous to rub together, yet she’s been losing at least five hundred francs each night this week. She covers the table with five-franc notes and loses consistently.”
So Tony himself must have been playing at the tables every night! Ann made no comment, but glanced in the direction of the woman indicated. She was rather a striking-looking woman, no longer young, with a clever, mobile mouth, and a pair of dark, tragic-looking eyes that appeared all the darker by contrast with her powder-white hair. She was of foreign nationality—Russian, probably, Ann reflected, with those high cheek-bones of hers and that subtle grace of movement. But she was atrociously dressed. Crammed down on to her beautiful white hair was a mannish-looking soft felt hat that had seen its best days long ago, and the coat and skirt she was wearing, though unmistakably of good cut, were old and shabby. In her hand she held an open note-case, eagerly counting over the Swiss notes it contained, while every now and again she lifted her sombre, tragic eyes and cast a hungry glance towards the room where boule was played, the doors of which were not yet open.
“She might be an exiled Russian princess,” commented Ann, observing a certain regal turn of the head which wore the battered mannish hat.
Tony nodded.
“That’s just what she is. She used to play a lot at Monte before the war. Now she can’t afford to go there. So she lives here and plays every night—on the proceeds of any odd jewellery she can still sell.”
Ann regarded her commiseratingly. The woman seemed to her a pathetically tragic figure—a sidelight on the many tragedies hidden among that cosmopolitan crowd on the terrace. Then her straying glance shifted to a man seated alone at the next table to the Russian’s, apparently absorbed in a newspaper. Tony followed the direction of her eyes.
“That chap plays bridge at the club sometimes,” he vouchsafed. “I don’t know who he is—never spoken to him. Foreigner, too, I should imagine. He’s so swarthy.”
Ann bestowed a second glance on the man in question. He was wearing evening kit, and at first sight the brown-skinned face above the white of his collar, taken in conjunction with dark hair and very strongly-marked brows, seemed to premise the correctness of Tony’s surmise. Suddenly the man lifted his bent head, and over the top of the newspaper Arm found herself looking into a pair of unmistakably grey eyes—grey as steel. They were very direct eyes, with a certain brooding discontent in their depths which looked as though it might flame out into sudden scorn with very little provocation.
She dropped her glance in some confusion. She felt rather as though she had been caught looking over her neighbour’s garden wall. There had been an ironical glint in the regard which the grey eyes had levelled at her that suggested their owner might have overheard Tony’s frank comment. Under cover of a fortissimo finale on the part of the orchestra she leant forward and spoke in a low voice:
“He’s as English as you are, Tony. No one but an Englishman ever had grey eyes like that.”