Sylvia had never heard such bitter accents issue from human lips before.
"The horse you saw me ride this morning," he went on in a low tone, "is not my horse; it belongs to my brother-in-law. It is sent for me every day because my sister loves me, and she thinks my health will suffer if I do not take exercise. My brother-in-law did not give me the horse, though he is the most generous of human beings, for he feared that if he did I should sell it in order that I might have more money for play."
There was a long, painful pause, then in a lighter tone the Count added, "And now, au revoir, Madame, and forgive me for having thrust my private affairs on your notice! It is not a thing I have been tempted ever to do before with one whom I have the honour of knowing as slightly as I know yourself."
Sylvia went upstairs to her room. She was touched, moved, excited. It was quite a new experience with her to come so really near to any man's heart and conscience.
Life is a secret and a tangled skein, full of loose, almost invisible threads. This curiously intimate, and yet impersonal conversation with one who was not only a stranger, but also a foreigner, made her realise how little we men and women really know of one another. How small was her knowledge, for instance, of Bill Chester—though, to be sure, of him there was perhaps nothing to know. How really little also she knew of Anna Wolsky! They had become friends, and yet Anna had never confided to her any intimate or secret thing about herself. Why, she did not even know Anna's home address!
Sylvia felt that there was now a link which hardly anything could break between herself and this Frenchman, whom she had never seen till a week ago. Even if they never met again after to-day, she would never forget that he had allowed her to see into the core of his sad, embittered heart. He had lifted a corner of the veil which covered his conscience, and he had done this in order that he might save her, a stranger, from what he knew by personal experience to be a terrible fate!
CHAPTER VII
Two hours later Sylvia Bailey was having luncheon with Anna Wolsky in the Pension Malfait.
The two hostelries, hers and Anna's, were in almost absurd contrast the one to the other. At the Villa du Lac everything was spacious, luxurious, and quiet. M. Polperro's clients spent, or so Sylvia supposed, much of their time in their own rooms upstairs, or else in the Casino, while many of them had their own motors, and went out on long excursions. They were cosmopolitans, and among them were a number of Russians.