“Whew!” said Aristide, sinking into his chair and wiping his face. “That was a narrow escape.”
He looked at his watch. It was only ten o’clock. It had seemed as if his game with Lussigny had lasted for hours. He could not go to bed and stood confronted with anti-climax. After a while he went in search of Eugene Miller and having found him in solitary meditation on stained glass windows in the dim-lit grounds of the Villa, sat down by his side and for the rest of the evening poured his peculiar knowledge of Europe into the listening ear of the young man from Atlanta.
On the following morning, as soon as he was dressed, he learned from the Concierge that the Comte de Lussigny had left for Paris by the early train.
“Good,” said Aristide.
A little later Mrs. Errington met him in the lounge and accompanied him to the lawn where they had sat the day before.
“I have no words to thank you, Monsieur Pujol,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I have heard how you shamed him at the tables. It was brave of you.”
“It was nothing.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he were in the habit of doing deeds like that every day of his life. “And your exquisite daughter, Madame?”
“Poor Betty! She is prostrate. She says she will never hold up her head again. Her heart is broken.”
“It is young and will be mended,” said Aristide.
She smiled sadly. “It will be a question of time. But she is grateful to you, Monsieur Pujol. She realizes from what a terrible fate you have saved her.” She sighed. There was a brief silence.