THE CHINK IN THE ARMOUR

CHAPTER I

A small, shiny, pink card lay on the round table in Sylvia Bailey's sitting-room at the Hôtel de l'Horloge in Paris.

She had become quite accustomed to finding one or more cards—cards from dressmakers, cards from corset-makers, cards from hairdressers—lying on her sitting-room table, but there had never been a card quite like this card.

Although it was pink, it looked more like a visiting-card than a tradesman's advertisement, and she took it up with some curiosity. It was inscribed "Madame Cagliostra," and underneath the name were written the words "Diseuse de la Bonne Aventure," and then, in a corner, in very small black letters, the address, "5, Rue Jolie, Montmartre."

A fortune-teller's card? What an extraordinary thing!

Like many pretty, prosperous, idle women, Sylvia was rather superstitious. Not long before this, her first visit to Paris, a London acquaintance had taken her to see a noted palmist named "Pharaoh," in Bond Street. She had paid her guinea willingly enough, but the result had vaguely disappointed her, and she had had the feeling, all the time she was with him, that the man was not really reading her hand.

True, "Pharaoh" had told her she was going abroad, and at that time she had no intention of doing so. The palmist had also told her—and this was really rather curious—that she would meet, when abroad, a foreign woman who would have a considerable influence on her life. Well, in this very Hôtel de l'Horloge Mrs. Bailey had come across a Polish lady, named Anna Wolsky, who was, like Sylvia herself, a young widow, and the two had taken a great fancy to one another.

It was most unlikely that Madame Wolsky would have the slightest influence on her, Sylvia Bailey's, life, but at any rate it was very curious coincidence. "Pharaoh" had proved to be right as to these two things—she had come abroad, and she had formed a friendship with a foreign woman.

Mrs. Bailey was still standing by the table, and still holding the pink card in her hand, when her new friend came into the room.

"Well?" said Anna Wolsky, speaking English with a strong foreign accent, but still speaking it remarkably well, "Have you yet decided, my dear, what we shall do this afternoon? There are a dozen things open to us, and I am absolutely at your service to do any one of them!"

Sylvia Bailey laughingly shook her head.

"I feel lazy," she said. "I've been at the Bon Marché ever since nine o'clock, and I feel more like having a rest than going out again, though it does seem a shame to stay in a day like this!"

The windows were wide open, the June sun was streaming in, and on the light breeze was borne the murmur of the traffic in the Avenue de l'Opéra, within a few yards of the quiet street where the Hôtel de l'Horloge is situated.

The other woman—Anna Wolsky was some years older than Sylvia Bailey—smiled indulgently.

"Tiens!" she cried suddenly, "what have you got there?" and she took the pink card out of Sylvia's hand.

"Madame Cagliostra?" she repeated, musingly. "Now where did I hear that name? Yes, of course it was from our chambermaid! Cagliostra is a friend of hers, and, according to her, a marvellous person—one from whom the devil keeps no secrets! She charges only five francs for a consultation, and it appears that all sorts of well-known people go to her, even those whom the Parisians call the Gratin, that is, the Upper Crust, from the Champs Elysées and the Faubourg St. Germain!"

"I don't think much of fortune-tellers," said Sylvia, thoughtfully. "I went to one last time I was in London and he really didn't tell me anything of the slightest interest."

Her conscience pricked her a little as she said this, for "Pharaoh" had certainly predicted a journey which she had then no intention of taking, and a meeting with a foreign woman. Yet here she was in Paris, and here was the foreign woman standing close to her!

Nay more, Anna Wolsky had become—it was really rather odd that it should be so—the first intimate friend of her own sex Sylvia had made since she was a grown-up woman.

"I do believe in fortune-tellers," said Madame Wolsky deliberately, "and that being so I shall spend my afternoon in going up to Montmartre, to the Rue Jolie, to hear what this Cagliostra has to say. It will be what you in England call 'a lark'! And I do not see why I should not give myself so cheap a lark as a five-franc lark!"

"Oh, if you really mean to go, I think I will go too!" cried Sylvia, gaily.

She was beginning to feel less tired, and the thought of a long lonely afternoon spent indoors and by herself lacked attraction.

Linking her arm through her friend's, she went downstairs and into the barely furnished dining-room, which was so very unlike an English hotel dining-room. In this dining-room the wallpaper simulated a vine-covered trellis, from out of which peeped blue-plumaged birds, and on each little table, covered by an unbleached table-cloth, stood an oil and vinegar cruet and a half-bottle of wine.

The Hôtel de l'Horloge was a typical French hotel, and foreigners very seldom stayed there. Sylvia had been told of the place by the old French lady who had been her governess, and who had taught her to speak French exceptionally well.

Several quiet Frenchmen, who had offices in the neighbourhood, were "en pension" at the Hôtel de l'Horloge, and as the two friends came in many were the steady, speculative glances cast in their direction.

To the average Frenchman every woman is interesting; for every Frenchman is in love with love, and in each fair stranger he sees the possible heroine of a romance in which he may play the agreeable part of hero. So it was that Sylvia Bailey and Anna Wolsky both had their silent admirers among those who lunched and dined in the narrow green and white dining-room of the Hôtel de l'Horloge.

Only a Frenchman would have given a second look at the Polish lady while Sylvia was by, but a Frenchman, being both a philosopher and a logician by nature, is very apt to content himself with the second-best when he knows the best is not for him.

The two friends were in entire contrast to one another. Madame Wolsky was tall, dark, almost swarthy; there was a look of rather haughty pride and reserve on her strong-featured face. She dressed extremely plainly, the only ornament ever worn by her being a small gold horseshoe, in the centre of which was treasured—so, not long ago, she had confided to Sylvia, who had been at once horrified and thrilled—a piece of the rope with which a man had hanged himself at Monte Carlo two years before! For Madame Wolsky—and she made no secret of the fact to her new friend—was a gambler.

Anna Wolsky was never really happy, she did not feel more than half alive, when away from the green cloth. She had only left Monte Carlo when the heat began to make the place unbearable to one of her northern temperament, and she was soon moving on to one of the French watering-places, where gambling of sorts can be indulged in all the summer through.

Different in looks, in temperament, and in tastes were the two young widows, and this, perhaps, was why they got on so excellently well together.

Sylvia Bailey was the foreign ideal of a beautiful Englishwoman. Her hair was fair, and curled naturally. Her eyes were of that blue which looks violet in the sunlight; and she had a delicate, rose leaf complexion.

Married when only nineteen to a man much older than herself, she was now at twenty-five a widow, and one without any intimate duties or close ties to fill her existence. Though she had mourned George Bailey sincerely, she had soon recovered all her normal interest and pleasure in life.

Mrs. Bailey was fond of dress and able to indulge her taste; but, even so, good feeling and the standard of propriety of the English country town of Market Dalling where she had spent most of her life, perhaps also a subtle instinct that nothing else would ever suit her so well, made her remain rigidly faithful to white and black, pale grey, and lavender. She also wore only one ornament, but it was a very becoming and an exceedingly costly ornament, for it consisted of a string of large and finely-matched pearls.

As the two friends went upstairs after luncheon Madame Wolsky said earnestly, "If I were you, Sylvia, I would certainly leave your pearls in the office this afternoon. Where is the use of wearing them on such an expedition as that to a fortune-teller?"

"But why shouldn't I wear them?" asked Sylvia, rather surprised.

"Well, in your place I should certainly leave anything as valuable as your pearls in safe keeping. After all, we know nothing of this Madame Cagliostra, and Montmartre is what Parisians call an eccentric quarter."

Sylvia Bailey disliked very much taking off her pearls. Though she could not have put the fact into words, this string of pearls was to her a symbol of her freedom, almost of her womanhood.

As a child and young girl she had been under the close guardianship of a stern father, and it was to please him that she had married the rich, middle-aged man at Market Dalling whose adoration she had endured rather than reciprocated. George Bailey also had been a determined man—determined that his young wife should live his way, not hers. During their brief married life he had heaped on her showy, rather than beautiful, jewels; nothing of great value, nothing she could wear when in mourning.

And then, four months after her husband's death, Sylvia's own aunt had died and left her a thousand pounds. It was this legacy—which her trustee, a young solicitor named William Chester, who was also a friend and an admirer of hers, as well as her trustee, had been proposing to invest in what he called "a remarkably good thing"—Mrs. Bailey had insisted on squandering on a string of pearls!

Sylvia had become aware, in the subtle way in which Women become aware of such things, that pearls were the fashion—in fact, in one sense, "the only wear." She had noticed that most of the great ladies of the neighbourhood of Market Dalling, those whom she saw on those occasions when town and county meet, each wore a string of pearls. She had also come to know that pearls seem to be the only gems which can be worn with absolute propriety by a widow, and so, suddenly, she had made up her mind to invest—she called it an "investment," while Chester called it an "absurd extravagance"—in a string of pearls.

Bill Chester had done his very best to persuade her to give up her silly notion, but she had held good; she had shown herself, at any rate on this one occasion, and in spite of her kindly, yielding nature, obstinate.

This was why her beautiful pearls had become to Sylvia Bailey a symbol of her freedom. The thousand pounds, invested as Bill Chester had meant to invest it, would have brought her in £55 a year, so he had told her in a grave, disapproving tone.

In return she had told him, the colour rushing into her pretty face, that after all she had the right to do what she chose with her legacy, the more so that this thousand pounds was in a peculiar sense her own money, as the woman who had left it her was her mother's sister, having nothing to do either with her father or with the late George Bailey!

And so she had had her way—nay, more; Chester, at the very last, had gone to great trouble in order that she might not be cheated over her purchase. Best of all, Bill—Sylvia always called the serious-minded young lawyer "Bill"—had lived to admit that Mrs. Bailey had made a good investment after all, for her pearls had increased in value in the two years she had had them.

Be that as it may, the young widow often reminded herself that nothing she had ever bought, and nothing that had ever been given her, had caused her such lasting pleasure as her beloved string of pearls!

But on this pleasant June afternoon, in deference to her determined friend's advice, she took off her pearls before starting out for Montmartre, leaving the case in the charge of M. Girard, the genial proprietor of the Hôtel de l'Horloge.

CHAPTER II

With easy, leisurely steps, constantly stopping to look into the windows of the quaint shops they passed on the way, Sylvia Bailey and Anna Wolsky walked up the steep, the almost mountainous byways and narrow streets which lead to the top of Montmartre.

The whole population seemed to have poured itself out in the open air on this sunny day; even the shopkeepers had brought chairs out of their shops and sat on the pavement, gaily laughing and gossiping together in the eager way Parisians have. As the two foreign ladies, both young, both in their very different fashion good-looking, walked past the sitting groups of neighbours—men, women, and children would stop talking and stare intently at them, as is also a Parisian way.

At first Sylvia had disliked the manner in which she was stared at in Paris, and she had been much embarrassed as well as a little amused by the very frank remarks called forth in omnibuses as well as in the street by the brilliancy of her complexion and the bright beauty of her fair hair. But now she was almost used to this odd form of homage, which came quite as often from women as from men.

"The Rue Jolie?" answered a cheerful-looking man in answer to a question. "Why, it's ever so much further up!" and he vaguely pointed skywards.

And it was much further up, close to the very top of the great hill! In fact, it took the two ladies a long time to find it, for the Rue Jolie was the funniest, tiniest little street, perched high up on what might almost have been a mountain side.

As for No. 5, Rue Jolie, it was a queer miniature house more like a Swiss châlet than anything else, and surrounded by a gay, untidy little garden full of flowers, the kind of half-wild, shy, and yet hardy flowers that come up, year after year, without being tended or watered.

"Surely a fortune-teller can't live here?" exclaimed Sylvia Bailey, remembering the stately, awe-inspiring rooms in which "Pharaoh" received his clients in Bond Street.

"Oh, yes, this is evidently the place!"

Anna Wolsky smiled good-humouredly; she had become extremely fond of the young Englishwoman; she delighted in Sylvia's radiant prettiness, her kindly good-temper, and her eager pleasure in everything.

A large iron gate gave access to the courtyard which was so much larger than the house built round it. But the gate was locked, and a pull at the rusty bell-wire produced no result.

They waited a while. "She must have gone out," said Sylvia, rather disappointed.

But Madame Wolsky, without speaking, again pulled at the rusty wire, and then one of the châlet windows was suddenly flung open from above, and a woman—a dark, middle-aged Frenchwoman—leant out.

"Qui est là?" and then before either of them could answer, the woman had drawn back: a moment later they heard her heavy progress down the creaky stairs of her dwelling.

At last she came out into the courtyard, unlocked the iron gate, and curtly motioned to the two ladies to follow her.

"We have come to see Madame Cagliostra," said Sylvia timidly. She took this stout, untidily-dressed woman for the fortune-teller's servant.

"Madame Cagliostra, at your service!" The woman turned round, her face breaking into a broad smile. She evidently liked the sound of her peculiar name.

They followed her up a dark staircase into a curious little sitting-room. It was scrupulously clean, but about it hung the faint odour which the French eloquently describe as "shut in," and even on this beautiful hot day the windows were tightly closed.

On the red walls hung various drawings of hands, of hearts, and of heads, and over the plain mantelpiece was a really fine pastel portrait of a man, in eighteenth century dress and powdered hair.

"My ancestor, Count Cagliostro, ladies!" exclaimed the fat little woman proudly. "As you will soon see, if you have, as I venture to suppose, come to consult me, I have inherited the great gifts which made Count Cagliostro famous." She waited a moment. "What is it you desire of me? Do you wish for the Grand Jeu? Or do you prefer the Crystal?"

Madame Cagliostra gave a shrewd, measuring glance at the two young women standing before her. She was wondering how much they were good for.

"No doubt you have been told," she said suddenly, "that my fee is five francs. But if you require the Grand Jeu it will be ten francs. Come, ladies, make up your minds; I will give you both the Grand Jeu for fifteen francs!"

Sylvia Bailey's lip quivered; she felt a wild wish to burst out laughing. It was all so absurd; this funny queer house; this odd, stuffy, empty-looking room; and this vulgar, common-looking woman asserting that she was descended from the famous Count Cagliostro! And then, to crown everything, the naïve, rather pathetic, attempt to get an extra five francs out of them.

But Sylvia was a very kindly, happy-natured creature, and she would not have hurt the feelings of even a Madame Cagliostra for the world.

She looked at her friend questioningly. Would it not be better just to give the woman five francs and go away? They surely could not expect to hear anything of any value from such a person. She was evidently a fraud!

But Anna Wolsky was staring at Madame Cagliostra with a serious look.

"Very well," she exclaimed, in her rather indifferent French. "Very well! We will both take the Grand Jeu at fifteen francs the two."

She turned and smiled at Sylvia. "It will be," she said, quaintly, and in English, "my 'treat,' dear friend." And then, as Sylvia shook her head decidedly—there were often these little contests of generosity between the two women—she added rather sharply,

"Yes, yes! It shall be so. I insist! I see you do not believe in our hostess's gift. There are, however, one or two questions I must ask, and to which I fancy she can give me an answer. I am anxious, too, to hear what she will say about you."

Sylvia smiled, and gave way.

Like most prosperous people who have not made the money they are able to spend, Mrs. Bailey did not attach any undue importance to wealth. But she knew that her friend was not as well off as herself, and therefore she was always trying to pay a little more of her share than was fair. Thanks to Madame Wolsky's stronger will, she very seldom succeeded in doing so.

"We might at least ask her to open the window," she said rather plaintively. It really was dreadfully stuffy!

Madame Cagliostra had gone to a sideboard from which she was taking two packs of exceedingly dirty, queer-looking cards. They were the famous Taro cards, but Sylvia did not know that.

When the fortune-teller was asked to open the window, she shook her head decidedly.

"No, no!" she said. "It would dissipate the influences. I cannot do that! On the contrary, the curtains should be drawn close, and if the ladies will permit of it I will light my lamp."

Even as she spoke she was jerking the thick curtains closely together; she even pinned them across so that no ray of the bright sunlight outside could penetrate into the room.

For a few moments they were in complete darkness, and Sylvia felt a queer, eerie sensation of fear, but this soon passed away as the lamp—the "Suspension," as Madame Cagliostra proudly called it—was lit.

When her lamp was well alight, the soothsayer drew three chairs up to the round table, and motioned the two strangers to sit down.

"You will take my friend first," said Anna Wolsky, imperiously; and then, to Sylvia, she said, in English, "Would you rather I went away, dear? I could wait on the staircase till you were ready for me to come back. It is not very pleasant to have one's fortune told when one is as young and as pretty as you are, before other people."

"Of course I don't mind your being here!" cried Sylvia Bailey, laughing—then, looking doubtfully at Madame Cagliostra, though it was obvious the Frenchwoman did not understand English, "The truth is that I should feel rather frightened if you were to leave me here all by myself. So please stay."

Madame Cagliostra began dealing out the cards on the table. First slowly, then quickly, she laid them out in a queer pattern; and as she did so she muttered and murmured to herself. Then a frown came over her face; she began to look disturbed, anxious, almost angry.

Sylvia, in spite of herself, grew interested and excited. She was sorry she had not taken off her wedding-ring. In England the wise woman always takes off her wedding-ring on going to see a fortune-teller. She was also rather glad that she had left her pearls in the safe custody of M. Girard. This little house in the Rue Jolie was a strange, lonely place.

Suddenly Madame Cagliostra began to speak in a quick, clear, monotonous voice.

Keeping her eyes fixed on the cards, which now and again she touched with a fat finger, and without looking at Sylvia, she said:

"Madame has led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat that has always lain in harbour—" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed complacently, and then she went on in quite another tone of voice:—

"To return to Madame and her fate! The boat has always been in harbour, but now it is about to put out to sea. It will meet there another craft. This other craft is, to Madame, a foreign craft, and I grieve to say it, rather battered. But its timbers are sound, and that is well, for it looks to me as if the sails of Madame's boat would mingle, at any rate for a time with this battered craft."

"I don't understand what she means," said Sylvia, in a whisper. "Do ask her to explain, Anna!"

"My friend asks you to drop metaphor," said the older woman, drily.

The soothsayer fixed her bright, beady little eyes on Sylvia's flushed face.

"Well," she said deliberately, "I see you falling in love, and I also see that falling in love is quite a new experience. It burns, it scorches you, does love, Madame. And for awhile you do not know what it means, for love has never yet touched you with his red-hot finger."

"How absurd!" thought Sylvia to herself. "She actually takes me for a young girl! What ridiculous mistakes fortune-tellers do make, to be sure!"

"—But you cannot escape love," went on Madame Cagliostra, eagerly. "Your fate is a fair man, which is strange considering that you also are a fair woman; and I see that there is already a dark man in your life."

Sylvia blushed. Bill Chester, just now the only man in her life, was a very dark man.

"But this fair man knows all the arts of love." Madame Cagliostra sighed, her voice softened, it became strangely low and sweet. "He will love you tenderly as well as passionately. And as for you, Madame—but no, for me to tell you what you will feel and what you will do would not be delicate on my part!"

Sylvia grew redder and redder. She tried to laugh, but failed. She felt angry, and not a little disgusted.

"You are a foreigner," went on Madame Cagliostra. Her voice had grown hard and expressionless again.

Sylvia smiled a little satiric smile.

"But though you are a foreigner," cried the fortune-teller with sudden energy, "it is quite possible that you will never go back to your own country! Stop—or, perhaps, I shall say too much! Still if you ever do go back, it will be as a stranger. That I say with certainty. And I add that I hope with all my heart that you will live to go back to your own country, Madame!"

Sylvia felt a vague, uneasy feeling of oppression, almost of fear, steal over her. It seemed to her that Madame Cagliostra was looking at her with puzzled, pitying eyes.

The soothsayer again put a fat and not too clean finger down on the upturned face of a card.

"There is something here I do not understand; something which I miss when I look at you as I am now looking at you. It is something you always wear—"

She gazed searchingly at Sylvia, and her eyes travelled over Mrs. Bailey's neck and bosom.

"I see them and yet they are not there! They appear like little balls of light. Surely it is a necklace?"

Sylvia looked extremely surprised. Now, at last, Madame Cagliostra was justifying her claim to a supernatural gift!

"These balls of light are also your Fate!" exclaimed the woman impetuously. "If you had them here—I care not what they be—I should entreat you to give them to me to throw away."

Madame Wolsky began to laugh. "I don't think you would do that," she observed drily.

But Madame Cagliostra did not seem to hear the interruption.

"Have you heard of a mascot?" she said abruptly. "Of a mascot which brings good fortune to its wearer?"

Sylvia bent her head. Of course she had heard of mascots.

"Well, if so, you have, of course, heard of objects which bring misfortune to their wearers—which are, so to speak, unlucky mascots?"

And this time it was Anna Wolsky who, leaning forward, nodded gravely. She attributed a run of bad luck she had had the year before to a trifling gift, twin cherries made of enamel, which a friend had given her, in her old home, on her birthday. Till she had thrown that little brooch into the sea, she had been persistently unlucky at play.

"Your friend," murmured Madame Cagliostra, now addressing herself to Anna and not to Sylvia, "should dispossess herself as quickly as possible of her necklace, of these round balls. They have already brought her ill-fortune in the past, they have lowered her in the estimation of an estimable person—in fact, if she is not very careful, indeed, even if she be very careful—it looks to me, Madame, as if they would end by strangling her!"

Sylvia became very uncomfortable. "Of course she means my pearls," she whispered. "But how absurd to say they could ever do me harm."

"Look here," said Anna Wolsky earnestly, "you are quite right, Madame; my friend has a necklace which has already played a certain part in her life. But is it not just because of this fact that you feel the influence of this necklace so strongly? I entreat you to speak frankly. You are really distressing me very much!"

Madame Cagliostra looked very seriously at the speaker.

"Well, perhaps it is so," she said at last. "Of course, we are sometimes wrong in our premonitions. And I confess that I feel puzzled—exceedingly puzzled—to-day. I do not know that I have ever had so strange a case as that of this English lady before me! I see so many roads stretching before her—I also see her going along more than one road. As a rule, one does not see this in the cards."

She looked really harassed, really distressed, and was still conning her cards anxiously.

"And yet after all," she cried suddenly, "I may be wrong! Perhaps the necklace has less to do with it than I thought! I do not know whether the necklace would make any real difference! If she takes one of the roads open to her, then I see no danger at all attaching to the preservation of this necklace. But the other road leads straight to the House of Peril."

"The House of Peril?" echoed Sylvia Bailey.

"Yes, Madame. Do you not know that all men and women have their House of Peril—the house whose threshold they should never cross—behind whose door lies misery, sometimes dishonour?"

"Yes," said Anna Wolsky, "that is true, quite true! There has been, alas! more than one House of Peril in my life." She added, "But what kind of place is my friend's House of Peril?"

"It is not a large house," said the fortune-teller, staring down at the shining surface of her table. "It is a gay, delightful little place, ladies—quite my idea of a pretty dwelling. But it is filled with horror unutterable to Madame. Ah! I entreat you"—she stared sadly at Sylvia—"to beware of unknown buildings, especially if you persist in keeping and in wearing your necklace."

"Do tell us, Madame, something more about my friend's necklace. Is it, for instance, of great value, and is it its value that makes it a source of danger?"

Anna Wolsky wondered very much what would be the answer to this question. She had had her doubts as to the genuineness of the pearls her friend wore. Pearls are so exquisitely imitated nowadays, and these pearls, if genuine, were of such great value!

At first she had not believed them to be real, then gradually she had become convinced of Sylvia's good faith. If the pearls were false, Sylvia did not know it.

But Madame Cagliostra's answer was disappointing—or prudent.

"I cannot tell you that," she said. "I cannot even tell you of what the necklace is composed. It may be of gold, of silver, of diamonds, of pearls—it may be, I'm inclined to think it is, composed of Egyptian scarabei. They, as you know, often bring terrible ill-fortune in their train, especially when they have been taken from the bodies of mummies. But the necklace has already caused this lady to quarrel with a very good and sure friend of hers—of that I am sure. And, as I tell you, I see in the future that this necklace may cause her very serious trouble—indeed, I see it wound like a serpent round her neck, pressing ever tighter and tighter—"

She suddenly began shuffling the cards. "And now," she said in a tone of relief, "I will deal with you, Madame," and she turned to Anna with a smile.

Sylvia drew her chair a little away from the table.

She felt depressed and uncomfortable. What an odd queer kind of fortune had been told her! And then it had all been so muddled. She could scarcely remember what it was that had been told her.

Two things, however, remained very clear in her mind: The one was the absurd prediction that she might never go back to her own country; the second was all that extraordinary talk about her pearls. As to the promised lover, the memory of the soothsayer's words made her feel very angry. No doubt Frenchwomen liked that sort of innuendo, but it only disgusted her.

Yet it was really very strange that Madame Cagliostra had known, or rather had divined, that she possessed a necklace by which she laid great store. But wasn't there such a thing as telepathy? Isn't it supposed by some people that fortune-tellers simply see into the minds of those who come to them, and then arrange what they see there according to their fancy?

That, of course, would entirely account for all that the fortune-teller had said about her pearls.

Sylvia always felt a little uncomfortable when her pearls were not lying round her pretty neck. The first time she had left them in the hotel bureau, at her new friend's request, was when they had been together to some place of amusement at night, and she had felt quite miserable, quite lost without them. She had even caught herself wondering whether M. Girard was perfectly honest, whether she could trust him not to have her dear pearls changed by some clever jeweller, though, to be sure, she felt she would have known her string of pearls anywhere!

But what was this that was going on between the other two?

Madame Cagliostra dealt out the pack of cards in a slow, deliberate fashion—and then she uttered a kind of low hoarse cry, and mixed the cards all together, hurriedly.

Getting up from the table, she exclaimed, "I regret, Madame, that I can tell you nothing—nothing at all! I feel ill—very ill!" and, indeed, she had turned, even to Sylvia's young and unobservant eyes, terribly pale.

For some moments the soothsayer stood staring into Anna Wolsky's astonished face.

"I know I've disappointed you, Mesdames, but I hope this will not prevent your telling your friends of my powers. Allow me to assure you that it is not often that I am taken in this way!"

Her voice had dropped to a whisper. She was now gazing down at the pack of cards which lay on the table with a look of horror and oppression on her face.

"I will only charge five francs," she muttered at last, "for I know that I have not satisfied you."

Sylvia sprang to the window. She tore apart the curtains and pulled up the sash.

"No wonder the poor woman feels faint," she said quickly. "It's absurd to sit with a window tight shut in this kind of room, which is little more than a box with three people in it!"

Madame Cagliostra had sunk down into her chair again.

"I must beg you to go away, Mesdames," she muttered, faintly. "Five francs is all I ask of you."

But Anna Wolsky was behaving in what appeared to Sylvia a very strange manner. She walked round to where the fortune-teller was sitting.

"You saw something in the cards which you do not wish to tell me?" she said imperiously. "I do not mind being told the truth. I am not a child."

"I swear I saw nothing!" cried the Frenchwoman angrily. "I am too ill to see anything. The cards were to me perfectly blank!"

In the bright sunlight now pouring into the little room the soothsayer looked ghastly, her skin had turned a greenish white.

"Mesdames, I beg you to excuse me," she said again. "If you do not wish to give me the five francs, I will not exact any fee."

She pointed with a shaking finger to the door, and Sylvia put a five-franc piece down on the table.

But before her visitors had quite groped their way to the end of the short, steep staircase, they heard a cry.

"Mesdames!" then after a moment's pause, "Mesdames, I implore you to come back!"

They looked at one another, and then Anna, putting her finger to her lips, went back up the stairs, alone.

"Well," she said, briefly, "I knew you had something to tell me. What is it?"

"No," said Madame Cagliostra dully. "I must have the other lady here, too. You must both be present to hear what I have to say."

Anna went to the door and called out, "Come up Sylvia! She wants to see us both together."

There was a thrill of excitement, of eager expectancy in Madame Wolsky's voice; and Sylvia, surprised, ran up again into the little room, now full of light, sun, and air.

"Stand side by side," ordered the soothsayer shortly. She stared at them for a moment, and then she said with extreme earnestness:—

"I dare not let you go away without giving you a warning. Your two fates are closely intertwined. Do not leave Paris for awhile, especially do not leave Paris together. I see you both running into terrible danger! If you do go away—and I greatly fear that you will do so—then I advise you, together and separately, to return to Paris as soon as possible."

"One question I must ask of you," said Anna Wolsky urgently. "How goes my luck? You know what I mean? I play!"

"It is not your luck that is threatened," replied the fortune-teller, solemnly; "on the contrary, I see wonderful luck; packets of bank-notes and rouleaux of gold! It is not your luck—it is something far, far more important that is in peril. Something which means far more to you even than your luck!"

The Polish woman smiled rather sadly.

"I wonder what that can be?" she exclaimed.

"It is your life!"

"My life?" echoed Anna. "I do not know that I value my life as much as you think I do."

"The English have a proverb, Madame, which says: 'A short life and a merry one.'"

"Can you predict that I shall have, if a short life, then a merry one?"

"Yes," said Madame Cagliostra, "that I can promise you." But there was no smile on her pale face. "And more, I can predict—if you will only follow my advice, if you do not leave Paris for, say"—she hesitated a moment, as if making a silent calculation—"twelve weeks, I can predict you, if not so happy a life, then a long life and a fairly merry one. Will you take my advice, Madame?" she went on, almost threateningly. "Believe me, I do not often offer advice to my clients. It is not my business to do so. But I should have been a wicked woman had I not done so this time. That is why I called you back."

"Is it because of something you have seen in the cards that you tender us this advice?" asked Anna curiously.

But Madame Cagliostra again looked strangely frightened.

"No, no!" she said hastily. "I repeat that the cards told me nothing. The cards were a blank. I could see nothing in them. But, of course, we do not only tell fortunes by cards"—she spoke very quickly and rather confusedly. "There is such a thing as a premonition."

She waited a moment, and then, in a business-like tone, added, "And now I leave the question of the fee to the generosity of these ladies!"

Madame Wolsky smiled a little grimly, and pulled out a twenty-franc piece.

The woman bowed, and murmured her thanks.

When they were out again into the roughly paved little street, Anna suddenly began to laugh.

"Now, isn't that a typical Frenchwoman? She really did feel ill, she really saw nothing in my cards, and, being an honest woman, she did not feel that she could ask us to pay! Then, when we had gone away, leaving only five francs, her thrift got the better of her honesty; she felt she had thrown away ten good francs! She therefore called us back, and gave us what she took to be very excellent advice. You see, I had told her that I am a gambler. She knows, as we all know, that to play for money is a foolish thing to do. She is aware that in Paris it is not very easy for a stranger to obtain admittance—especially if that stranger be a respectable woman—to a gambling club. She therefore said to herself, 'I will give this lady far more than ten francs' worth of advice. I will tell her not to go away! As long as she remains in Paris she cannot lose her money. If she goes to Dieppe, Trouville, any place where there is a Casino, she will lose her money. Therefore I am giving her invaluable advice—worth far more than the ten francs which she ought to be made to give me, and which she shall be made to give me!'"

"I suppose you are right," said Sylvia thoughtfully. "And yet—and yet—she certainly spoke very seriously, did she not, Anna? She seemed quite honestly—in fact, terribly afraid that we should go away together."

"But there is no idea of our going away together," said Madame Wolsky, rather crossly. "I only wish there were! You are going on to Switzerland to join your friends, and as for me, in spite of Madame Cagliostra's mysterious predictions, I shall, of course, go to some place—I think it will be Dieppe (I like the Dieppe Casino the best)—where I can play. And the memory of you, my dear little English friend, will be my mascot. You heard her say that I should be fortunate—that I should have an extraordinary run of good fortune?"

"Yes," said Sylvia, "but do not forget"—she spoke with a certain gravity; death was a very real thing to her, for she had seen in the last two years two deathbeds, that of her father, that of her husband—"do not forget, Anna, that she told you you would not live long if you went away."

"She was quite safe in saying that to me," replied the other hastily. "People who play—those who get the gambling fever into their system when they are still young—do not, as a rule, live very long. Their emotions are too strong, too often excited! Play should be reserved for the old—the old get so quickly deadened, they do not go through the terrible moments younger people do!"

CHAPTER III

On the morning after her visit to Madame Cagliostra, Sylvia Bailey woke later than usual. She had had a disturbed night, and it was pleasant to feel that she could spend a long restful day doing nothing, or only taking part in one of the gay little expeditions which make Paris to a stranger the most delightful of European capitals.

She opened wide both the windows of her room, and from outside there floated in a busy, happy murmur, for Paris is an early city, and nine o'clock there is equivalent to eleven o'clock in London.

She heard the picturesque street cries of the flower-sellers in the Avenue de l'Opéra—"Beflower yourselves, gentlemen and ladies, beflower yourselves!"

The gay, shrill sounds floated in to her, and, in spite of her bad night and ugly dreams, she felt extraordinarily well and happy.

Cities are like people. In some cities one feels at home at once; others remain, however well acquainted we become with them, always strangers.

Sylvia Bailey, born, bred, married, widowed in an English provincial town, had always felt strange in London. But with Paris,—dear, delightful, sunny Paris,—she had become on the closest, the most affectionately intimate terms from the first day. She had only been here a month, and yet she already knew with familiar knowledge the quarter in which was situated her quiet little hotel, that wonderful square mile—it is not more—which has as its centre the Paris Opera House, and which includes the Rue de la Paix and the beginning of each of the great arteries of modern Paris.

And that was not all. Sylvia Bailey knew something of the France of the past. The quiet, clever, old-fashioned Frenchwoman by whom she had been educated had seen to that. She could wander through the narrow streets on the other side of the Seine, and reconstitute the amazing, moving, tragic things which happened there during the great Revolution.

She was now half sorry to think that in ten days or so she had promised to join some acquaintances in Switzerland. Luckily her trustee and would-be lover, Bill Chester, proposed to come out and join the party there. That was something to look forward to, for Sylvia was very fond of him, though he sometimes made her angry by his fussy ways. Chester had not approved of her going to Paris by herself, and he would certainly have shaken his head had he known of yesterday's visit to Madame Cagliostra.

And then Sylvia Bailey began to think of her new friend: of Anna Wolsky. She was sorry, very sorry, that they were going to part so soon. If only Anna would consent to come on with her to Switzerland! But alas! there was no chance of that, for there are no Casinos, no gambling, in the land of William Tell.

There came a knock at the door, and Madame Wolsky walked in. She was dressed for a journey.

"I have to go out of town this morning," she said, "but the place I am going to is quite near, and I shall be back this afternoon."

"Where are you going?" asked Sylvia, naïvely. "Or is it a secret?"

"No, it is not a secret." Anna smiled provokingly. "I am going to go to a place called Lacville. I do not suppose you have ever heard of Lacville, Sylvia?"

The other shook her head.

"I thought not," cried Anna, suddenly bursting out laughing. Then, "Good-bye!" she exclaimed, and she was gone before Sylvia could say anything else.

Lacville? There had been a sparkle, a look of life, of energy in Anna's face. Why was Anna Wolsky going to Lacville? There was something about the place concerning which she had chosen to be mysterious, and yet she had made no secret of going there.

Mrs. Bailey jumped out of bed, and dressed rather more quickly than usual.

It was a very hot day. In fact, it was unpleasantly hot. How delightful it would be to get into the country even for an hour. Why should she not also make her way to Lacville?

She opened the "Guide-Book to Paris and its Environs," of which she had made such good use in the last month, and looked up "Lacville" in the index.

Situated within a drive of the beautiful Forest of Montmorency, the pretty little town of Lacville is still famed for its healing springs and during the summer months of the year is much frequented by Parisians. There are frequent trains from the Gare du Nord.

No kind fairy whispered the truth to Sylvia—namely that this account is only half, nay, a quarter, or an eighth, of the truth.

Lacville is the spendthrift, the gambler—the austere would call her the chartered libertine—of the group of pretty country towns which encircle Paris; for Lacville is in the proud possession of a Gambling Concession which has gradually turned what was once the quietest of inland watering-places into a miniature Monte Carlo.

The vast majority of intelligent, cultivated English and American visitors to Paris remain quite unaware that there is, within half an hour of the French capital, such a spot; the minority, those tourists who do make their way to the alluring little place, generally live to regret it.

But Sylvia knew nothing, nay, less than nothing, of all this, and even if she had known, it would not have stayed her steps to-day.

She put on her hat and hurried down to the office. There M. Girard would doubtless tell her of a good train to Lacville, and if it were a small place she might easily run across Anna Wolsky.

M. Girard was a very busy man, yet he always found time for a talk with any foreign client of his hotel.

"I want to know," said Sylvia, smiling in spite of herself, for the hotel-keeper was such a merry-looking little man, and so utterly different from any English hotel-keeper she had ever seen!—"I want to know, M. Girard, which is the best way to a place called Lacville? Have you ever been there?"

"Lacville?" echoed M. Girard delightedly; but there came a rather funny look over his shrewd, round face. "Yes, indeed, I have been there, Madame! Not this season yet, but often last summer, and I shall be going there shortly again. I have a friend there—indeed, he is more than a friend, he is a relation of mine, who keeps the most select hotel at Lacville. It is called the Villa du Lac. Is Madame thinking of going to Lacville instead of to Switzerland?"

Sylvia shook her head. "Oh, no! But Madame Wolsky is there to-day, and I should have gone with her if I had been ready when she came down. It has turned so hot that I feel a few hours in the country would be pleasant, and I am quite likely to meet her, for I suppose Lacville is not a very large place, M. Girard?"

The hotel-keeper hesitated; he found it really difficult to give a true answer to this simple question.

"Lacville?" he repeated; "well—Dame! Lacville is Lacville! It is not like anything Madame has ever seen. On that I would lay my life. First, there is a most beautiful lake—that is, perhaps, the principal attraction;—then the villas of Lacville—ah! they are ravishingly lovely, and then there is also"—he fixed his black eyes on her—"a Casino."

"A Casino?" echoed Sylvia. She scarcely knew what a Casino was.

"But to see the Casino properly Madame must go at night, and it would be well if Madame were accompanied by a gentleman. I do not think Madame should go by herself, but if Madame really desires to see Lacville properly my wife and I will make a great pleasure to ourselves to accompany her there one Sunday night. It is very gay, is Lacville on Sunday night—or, perhaps," added M. Girard quickly, "Madame, being English, would prefer a Saturday night? Lacville is also very gay on Saturday nights."

"But is there anything going on there at night?" asked Sylvia, astonished. "I thought Lacville was a country place."

"There are a hundred and twenty trains daily from the Gare du Nord to Lacville," said the hotel-keeper drily. "A great many Parisians spend the evening there each day. They do not start till nine o'clock in the evening, and they are back, having spent a very pleasant, or sometimes an unpleasant, soirée, before midnight."

"A hundred and twenty trains!" repeated Sylvia, amazed. "But why do so many people want to go to Lacville?"

Again the hotel-keeper stared at her with a questioning look. Was it possible that pretty Madame Bailey did not know what was the real attraction of Lacville? Yet it was not his business to run the place down—as a matter of fact, he and his wife had invested nearly a thousand pounds of their hard-earned savings in their relation's hotel, the Villa du Lac. If Madame Bailey really wanted to leave salubrious, beautiful Paris for the summer, why should she not go to Lacville instead of to dull, puritanical, stupid Switzerland?

These thoughts rushed through the active brain of M. Girard with amazing quickness.

"Many people go to Lacville in order to play baccarat," he said lightly.

And then Sylvia knew why Anna Wolsky had gone to Lacville.

"But apart from the play, Lacville is a little paradise, Madame," he went on enthusiastically. "It is a beauteous spot, just like a scene in an opera. There is the romantic lake, edged with high, shady trees and princely villas—and then the gay, the delightful Casino!"

"And is there a train soon?"

"I will look Madame out a train this moment, and I will also give her one of my cousin Polperro's cards. Madame has, of course, heard of the Empress Eugénie? Well, the Villa du Lac once belonged to one of the Empress's gentlemen-in-waiting. The very highest nobility stay at the Villa du Lac with my cousin. At this very moment he has Count Paul de Virieu, the brother-in-law of a duke, among his clients—"

M. Girard had noticed the British fondness for titles.

"You see, Madame, my cousin was chef to the Emperor of Brazil's sister—this has given him a connection among the nobility. In the winter he has an hotel at Mentone," he was looking up the train while he chatted happily.

"There is a train every ten minutes," he said at last, "from the Gare du Nord. Or, if Madame prefers it, she could walk up from here to the Square of the Trinité and take the tramway; but it is quicker and pleasanter to go by train—unless, indeed, Madame wishes to offer herself the luxury of an automobile. That, alas! I fear would cost Madame twenty to thirty francs."

"Of course I will go by train," said Sylvia, smiling, "and I will lunch at your cousin's hotel, M. Girard."

It would be quite easy to find Anna, or so she thought, for Anna would be at the Casino. Sylvia felt painfully interested in her friend's love of gambling. It was so strange that Anna was not ashamed of it.

And then as she drove to the great railway terminus, from which a hundred and twenty trains start daily for Lacville, it seemed to Sylvia that the whole of Paris was placarded with the name of the place she was now about to visit for the first time!

On every hoarding, on every bare piece of wall, were spread large, flamboyant posters showing a garish but not unattractive landscape. There was the sun sparkling on a wide stretch of water edged with high trees, and gay with little sailing boats, each boat with its human freight of two lovers. Jutting out into the blue lake was a great white building, which Sylvia realised must be the Casino. And under each picture ran the words "Lacville-les-Bains" printed in very black letters.

When she got to the Gare du Nord the same advertisement stared down at her from the walls of the station and of the waiting-rooms.

It was certainly odd that she had never heard of Lacville, and that the place had never been mentioned to her by any of those of her English acquaintances who thought they knew Paris so well.

The Lacville train was full of happy, chattering people. In her first-class carriage she had five fellow-travellers—a man and woman and three children. They looked cheerful, prosperous people, and soon the husband and wife began talking eagerly together.

"I really think," said the lady suddenly, "that we might have chosen some other place than Lacville in which to spend to-day! There are many places the children would have enjoyed more."

"But there is no place," said her husband in a jovial tone, "where I can spend an amusing hour in the afternoon."

"Ah, my friend, I feared that was coming!" exclaimed his wife, shaking her head. "But remember what happened the last time we were at Lacville—I mean the afternoon when you lost seventy francs!"

"But you forget that other afternoon!" answered the man eagerly. "I mean the afternoon when I made a hundred francs, and bought you and the children a number of delightful little gifts with the money!"

Sylvia was amused. How quaint and odd French people were! She could not imagine such an interchange of words between an English husband and wife, especially before a stranger. And then her amusement was further increased, for the youngest child, a boy of about six, cried out that he also wished to go to the Casino with his dear papa.

"No, no, my sweet cabbage, that will happen quite soon enough, when thou art older! If thou art in the least like thy father, there will certainly come a time when thou also wilt go and lose well-earned money at the Tables," said his mother tenderly.

"But if I win, then I shall buy thee a present," said the sweet cabbage coaxingly.

Sylvia looked out of the window. These happy, chattering people made her feel lonely, and even a little depressed.

The country through which the train was passing was very flat and ugly—in fact, it could scarcely be called country at all. And when at last they drew up into the large station of what was once a quiet, remote village where Parisian invalids, too poor to go elsewhere, came to take medicinal waters, she felt a pang of disappointment. Lacville, as seen from the railway, is an unattractive place.

"Is this Madame's first visit to Lacville?" asked her fellow-traveller, helping her out of the railway carriage. "If so, Madame would doubtless like to make her way to the lake. Would she care to accompany us thither?"

Sylvia hesitated. She almost felt inclined to go back to Paris by the next train. She told herself that there was no hope of finding Anna in such a large place, and that it was unlikely that this dreary-looking town would offer anything in the least pleasant or amusing on a very hot day.

But "It will be enchanting by the lake!" she heard some one say eagerly. And this chance remark made up her mind for her. After all, she might as well go and see the lake, of which everyone who mentioned Lacville spoke so enthusiastically.

Down the whole party swept along a narrow street, bordered by high white houses, shabby cafés, and little shops. Quite a crowd had left the station, and they were all now going the same way.

A turn in the narrow street, and Sylvia uttered a low cry of pleasure and astonishment!

Before her, like a scene in a play when the curtain is rung up, there suddenly appeared an immense sunlit expanse of water, fringed by high trees, and bordered by quaint, pretty châlets and villas, fantastic in shape, and each surrounded by a garden, which in many cases ran down to the edge of the lake.

To the right, stretching out over the water, its pinnacles and minarets reflected in blue translucent depths, rose what looked like a great white marble palace.

"Is it not lovely?" said the Frenchman eagerly. "And the water of the lake is so shallow, Madame, there is no fear of anyone being drowned in it! That is such an advantage when one has children."

"And it is a hundred times more charming in the afternoon," his wife chimed in, happily, "for then the lake is so full of little sailing-boats that you can hardly see the water. Oh, it is gay then, very gay!"

She glanced at Mrs. Bailey's pretty grey muslin dress and elegant parasol.

"I suppose Madame is going to one of the great restaurants? As for us, we shall make our way into a wood and have our luncheon there. It is expensive going to a restaurant with children."

She nodded pleasantly, with the easy, graceful familiarity which foreigners show in their dealings with strangers; and, shepherding their little party along, the worthy pair went briskly off by the broad avenue which girdles the lake.

Again Sylvia felt curiously alone. She was surrounded on every side by groups of merry-looking people, and already out on the lake there floated tiny white-sailed boats, each containing a man and a girl.

Everyone seemed to have a companion or companions; she alone was solitary. She even found herself wondering what she was doing there in a foreign country, by herself, when she might have been in England, in her own pleasant house at Market Dalling!

She took out of her bag the card which the landlord of the Hôtel de l'Horloge had pressed upon her. "Hôtel Pension, Villa du Lac, Lacville."

She went up rather timidly to a respectable-looking old bourgeois and his wife. "Do you know," she asked, "where is the Villa du Lac?"

"Certainly, Madame," answered the old man amiably. "It is there, close to you, not a hundred yards away. That big white house to our left." And then, with that love of giving information which possesses so many Frenchman, he added:

"The Villa du Lac once belonged to the Marquis de Para, who was gentleman-in-waiting to the Empress Eugénie. He and his family lived on here long after the war, in fact"—he lowered his voice—"till the Concession was granted to the Casino. You know what I mean? The Gambling Concession. Since then the world of Lacville has become rather mixed, as I have reason to know, for my wife and I have lived here fifteen years. The Marquis de Para sold his charming villa. He was driven away, like so many other excellent people. So the Villa du Lac is now an hotel, where doubtless Madame has friends?"

Sylvia bowed and thanked him. Yes, the Villa du Lac even now looked like a delightful and well-kept private house, rather than like an hotel. It stood some way back—behind high wrought-steel and gilt gates—from the sandy road which lay between it and the lake, and the stone-paved courtyard was edged with a line of green tubs, containing orange trees.

Sylvia walked through the gates, which stood hospitably open, and when she was half-way up the horseshoe stone-staircase which led to the front door, a man, dressed in the white dress of a French chef, and bearing an almost ludicrous resemblance to M. Girard, came hurrying out.

"Madame Bailey?" he exclaimed joyously, and bowing very low. "Have I the honour of greeting Madame Bailey? My cousin telephoned to me that you might be coming, Madame, to déjeuner!" And as Sylvia smiled in assent: "I am delighted, I am honoured, by the visit of Madame Bailey!"

Sylvia laughed outright. She really could not help it! It was very nice and thoughtful of M. Girard to have telephoned to his cousin. But how dreadful it would have been if she had gone straight back to Paris from the station. All these kind people would have had their trouble for nothing.

M. Polperro was a shrewd Southerner, and he had had the sense to make but few alterations to the Villa du Lac. It therefore retained something of the grand air it had worn in the days when it had been the property of a Court official. The large, cool, circular hall into which the hotel-keeper ushered Sylvia was charming, as were the long, finely decorated reception-rooms on either side.

The dining-room, filled with small oval tables, to which M. Polperro next led his honoured guest, had been built out since the house had become an hotel. It commanded a view of the lake on the one side, and of the large, shady garden of the villa on the other.

"I have arranged for Madame a little table in what we call the lake window," observed M. Polperro. "As yet Lacville is very empty. Paris is so delightful," he sighed, "but very soon, when the heat comes, Lacville will be quite full," he smiled joyously. "I myself have a very choice clientèle—I do not deal with rubbish." He drew himself up proudly. "My clients come back to me year after year. Already I have six visitors, and in ten days my pension will be au grand complet. It is quality, not quantity, that I desire, Madame. If ever you know anyone who wishes to come to Lacville you may safely recommend them—I say it with my hands on my heart," and he suited his action to his words—"to the Villa du Lac."

How delightful it all was to Sylvia Bailey! No wonder her feeling of depression and loneliness vanished.

As she sat down, and looked out of the bay window which commanded the whole length of the gleaming, sun-flecked lake, she told herself that, pleasant as was Paris, Lacville on a hot day was certainly a hundred times pleasanter than Paris.

And the Casino? Sylvia fixed her blue eyes on the white, fairy-like group of buildings, which were so attractive an addition to the pretty landscape.

Surely one might spend a pleasant time at Lacville and never play for money? Though she was inclined to feel that in this matter of gambling English people are curiously narrow. It was better to be philosophical about it, like that excellent Frenchwoman in the train, who had not grudged her husband a little amusement, even if it entailed his losing what she had described as "hard-earned money."

Though she had to wait nearly half an hour for her meal, the time passed quickly; and when at last déjeuner was served to her well and deftly by a pleasant-faced young waitress dressed in Breton costume, each item of the carefully-prepared meal was delicious. M. Polperro had not been chef to a Princess for nothing.

Sylvia Bailey was not greedy, but like most healthy people she enjoyed good food, and she had very seldom tasted quite such good food as that which was served to her at the Hôtel du Lac on this memorable June day.

She had almost finished her luncheon when a fair young man came in and sat down at a small table situated at the other end of the dining-room, close to the window overlooking the garden of the Villa du Lac.

CHAPTER IV

As the young man came into the dining-room he glanced over to where Mrs. Bailey was sitting and then he looked away, and, unfolding his table napkin, paid no more attention to the only other occupant of the room.

Now this was a very trifling fact, and yet it surprised our young Englishwoman; she had become accustomed to the way in which Frenchmen, or perhaps it would be more true to say Parisians, stare at a pretty woman in the streets, in omnibuses, and in shops. As for the dining-room of the Hôtel de l'Horloge, it always seemed full of eyes when she and Anna Wolsky were having lunch or dinner there.

Now, for the first time, she found herself close to a Frenchman without feeling either uncomfortably or amusingly aware of a steady, unwinking stare. It was quite an odd sensation to find herself thus neglected!

Without actually looking round, Sylvia, out of the corner of her blue eye, could see this exceptional Frenchman. He was dressed in white flannels, and he wore rather bright pink socks and a pink tie to match. He must be, she decided, something of a dandy. Though still a young man, he was rather bald, and he had a thick fair moustache. He looked bored and very grave; she could not help wondering why he was staying at Lacville.

M. Polperro suddenly appeared at the door. "Would M. le Comte prefer scrambled eggs or an omelette?" he asked obsequiously, and "M. le Comte" lifted his head and answered shortly, but with a smile, "Scrambled eggs, my good Polperro."

Doubtless this was the gentleman who was brother-in-law of the French Duke mentioned by M. Girard. He spoke to the chef with the kindly familiarity born of long knowledge.

After having given the Count his scrambled eggs, the young waitress came over to where Sylvia was sitting. "Would Madame like to have her coffee in the garden?" she asked; and Sylvia said that she would.

How enchanting was the garden of the Villa du Lac, and how unlike any hotel garden she had ever seen! The smooth, wide lawn was shaded with noble cedars and bright green chestnut trees; it was paradise compared with the rather stuffy little Hôtel de l'Horloge and the dusty Paris streets.

M. Polperro himself brought Sylvia's coffee. Then he stayed on talking to her, for like all clever hotel-keepers the Southerner had the gift of making those who were staying in his house feel as if they were indeed his guests rather than his clients.

"If Madame should ever care to make a little stay at Lacville, how happy Madame Polperro and I would be!" he exclaimed. "I have a beautiful room overlooking the lake which I could give Madame. It was reserved for a Russian Princess, but now she is not coming—"

"Perhaps I will come and stay here some day," said Sylvia, and she really felt as if she would like to come and stay in the Villa du Lac. "But I am going to Switzerland next week, so it will have to be the next time I come to France in the summer."

"Does Madame play?" asked M. Polperro, insinuatingly.

"I?" said Sylvia, laughing. "No, indeed! Of course, I play bridge—all English people play bridge—but I have never gambled, if you mean that, monsieur, in my life."

"I am delighted to hear Madame say so," said M. Polperro, heartily. "People now talk of Lacville as if there was only the Casino and the play. They forget the beautiful walks, the lovely lake, and the many other attractions we have to offer! Why, Madame, think of the Forest of Montmorency? In old days it was quite a drive from Lacville, but now a taxi or an automobile will get you there in a few minutes! Still the Casino is very attractive too; and all my clients belong to the Club!"

Sylvia stayed on for nearly an hour in the delightful, peaceful garden, and then, rather regretfully, she went up the lichen-covered steps which led into the hall. How deliciously cool and quiet it was there.

She paid her bill; it seemed very moderate considering how good her lunch had been, and then slowly made her way out of the Villa du Lac, down across the stone-flagged courtyard to the gate, and so into the sanded road.

Crossing over, she began walking by the edge of the lake; and once more loneliness fell upon her. The happy-looking people who passed her laughing and talking together, and the more silent couples who floated by on the water in the quaint miniature sailing boats with which the surface of the lake was now dotted, were none of them alone.

Suddenly the old parish church of Lacville chimed out the hour—it was only one o'clock—amazingly early still!

Someone coming across the road lifted his hat. Could it be to her? Yes, for it was the young man who had shared with her, for a time, the large dining-room of the Villa du Lac.

Again Sylvia was struck by what she could only suppose were the stranger's good manners, for instead of staring at her, as even the good-humoured bourgeois with whom she had travelled from Paris that morning had done, the Count—she remembered he was a Count—turned sharply to the right and walked briskly along to the turning which led to the Casino.

The Casino? Why, of course, it was there that she must look for Anna Wolsky. How stupid of her not to have thought of it! And so, after waiting a moment, she also joined the little string of people who were wending their way towards the great white building.

After having paid a franc for admission, Sylvia found herself in the hall of the Casino of Lacville. An eager attendant rushed forward to relieve her of the dust-cloak and parasol which she was carrying.

"Does Madame wish to go straight to the Room of the Games?" he inquired eagerly.

Sylvia bent her head. It was there, or so she supposed, that Anna would be.

Feeling a thrill of keen curiosity, she followed the man through a prettily-decorated vestibule, and so into a large room, overlooking the lake, where already a crowd of people were gathered round the green baize tables.

The Salle des Jeux at Lacville is a charming, conservatory-like apartment, looking, indeed, as if it were actually built out on the water.

But none of the people were looking at the beautiful scene outside. Instead, each group was intent on the table, and on the game being played thereon—a game, it may be mentioned, which has a certain affinity with Roulette and Petits Chevaux, though it is neither the one nor the other.

Sylvia looked about her timidly; but no one took the slightest notice of her, and this in itself was rather strange. She was used to exciting a good deal of attention wherever she went in France, but here, at Lacville, everyone seemed blind to her presence. It was almost as if she were invisible! In a way this was a relief to her; but at the same time, she found it curiously disconcerting.

She walked slowly round each gambling table, keeping well outside the various circles of people sitting and standing there.

Strange to say Anna Wolsky was not among them. Of that fact Sylvia soon became quite sure.

At last a servant in livery came up to her. "Does Madame want a seat?" he asked officiously. "If so, I can procure Madame a seat in a very few moments."

But Sylvia, blushing, shook her head. She certainly had no wish to sit down.

"I only came in to look for a friend," she said, hesitatingly; "but my friend is not here."

And she was making her way out of the Salle des Jeux, feeling rather disconsolate and disappointed, when suddenly, in the vestibule, she saw Madame Wolsky walking towards her in the company of a middle-aged man.

"Then that is settled?" Sylvia heard Anna say in her indifferent French. "You will fill up all the formalities, and by the time I arrive the card of membership will be ready for me? This kind of thing"—she waved her hand towards the large room Sylvia had just left—"is no use to me at all! I only like le Grand Jeu"; and a slight smile came over her dark face.

The man who was with her laughed as if she had made a good joke; then bowing, he left her.

"Sylvia!"

"Anna!"

Mrs. Bailey fancied that the other was not particularly sorry to have been followed.

"So you came after me? Well! Well! I never should have thought to have seen my dear Puritan, Sylvia Bailey, in such a place as the Casino of Lacville?" said the Polish lady laughing. "However, as you are here, let us enjoy ourselves. Would you like to risk a few francs?"

Together they had gone back into the Salle des Jeux, and Anna drew Sylvia towards the nearest table.

"This is a child's game!" she exclaimed, contemptuously. "I cannot understand how all these clever Parisians can care to come out here and lose their money every Saturday and Sunday, to say nothing of other days!"

"But I suppose some of these people make money?" questioned Sylvia. She thought she saw a great deal of money being won, as well as lost, on the green cloth of the table before her.

"Oh yes, no doubt a few may make money at this game! But I have just been arranging, with the aid of the owner of the Pension where I am going to stay when I come here, to join the Club."

And then, realising that Sylvia did not understand, she went on.

"You see, my dear child, there are two kinds of play here—as there are, indeed, at almost every Casino in France. There is this game, which is, as I say, a child's game—a game at which you can make or lose a few francs; and then there is Baccarat!"

She waited a moment.

"Yes?" said Sylvia questioningly.

"Baccarat is played here in what they call the Club, in another part of the building. As there is an entrance fee to the Club, there is never such a crowd in the Baccarat Room as there is here. And those who belong to the Club 'mean business,' as they say in your dear country. They come, that is, to play in the way that I understand and that I enjoy play!"

A little colour rose to Anna Wolsky's sallow cheeks; she looked exhilarated, excited at the thoughts and memories her words conjured up.

Sylvia also felt curiously excited. She found the scene strangely fascinating—the scene presented by this crowd of eager men and women, each and all absorbed in this mysterious game which looked anything but a child's game, though Anna had called it so.

But as they were trying to make their way through the now dense crowd of people, the middle-aged man who had been with Anna when Sylvia had first seen her just now hurried up to them.

"Everything is arranged, Madame!" he exclaimed. "Here is your membership card. May I have the pleasure of taking you myself to the Club? Your friend can come too. She does not want to play, does she?"

He looked inquisitively at Sylvia, and his hard face softened. He had your true Frenchman's pleasure in charm and beauty. "Madame, or is it Mademoiselle?—"

"Madame!" answered Anna, smiling.

"—Madame can certainly come in and look on for a few moments, even though she be not a member of the Club."

They turned and followed him up a broad, shallow staircase, into a part of the Casino where the very atmosphere seemed different from that surrounding the public gaming tables.

Here, in the Club, all was hushed and quiet, and underfoot was a thick carpet.

There were very few people in the Baccarat Room, some twelve men, and four or five ladies who were broken up into groups, and talking with one another in the intimate, desultory fashion in which people talk who meet daily in pursuit of some common interest or hobby.

And then, all at once, Sylvia Bailey saw that among them, but standing a little apart, was the Count—was not his name de Virieu?

He turned round, and as he saw her she thought that a look of surprise, almost of annoyance, flitted over his impassive face. Then he moved away from where he could see her.

A peculiar-looking old gentleman, who seemed on kindly terms with everyone in the room, pulled a large turnip watch out of his pocket. "It is nearly half-past one!" he exclaimed fussily. "Surely, it is time that we began! Who takes the Bank to-day?"

"I will," said the Comte de Virieu, coming forward.

Five minutes later play was in full swing. Sylvia did not in the least understand the game of Baccarat, and she would have been surprised indeed had she been told that the best account of it ever written is that which describes it as "neither a recreation nor an intellectual exercise, but simply a means for the rapid exchange of money well suited to persons of impatient temperament."

With fascinated eyes, Sylvia watched Anna put down her gold pieces on the green cloth. Then she noted the cards as they were dealt out, and listened, it must be admitted, uncomprehendingly, to the mysterious words which told how the game was going. Still she sympathised very heartily with her friend when Anna's gold pieces were swept away, and she rejoiced as heartily when gold was added to Anna's little pile.

They both stood, refusing the seats which were pressed upon them.

Suddenly Sylvia Bailey, looking up from the green cloth, saw the eyes of the man who held the Bank fixed full upon her.

The Comte de Virieu did not gaze at the young English woman with the bold, impersonal stare to which she had become accustomed—his glance was far more thoughtful, questioning, and in a sense kindly. But his eyes seemed to pierce her through and through, and suddenly her heart began to beat very fast. Yet no colour came into her face—indeed, Sylvia grew pale.

She looked down at the table, but even so she remained conscious of that piercing gaze turned on her, and with some surprise she found herself keenly visualising the young man's face.

Alone among all the people in the room, the Comte de Virieu looked as if he lived a more or less outdoor life; his face was tanned, his blue eyes were very bright, and the hands dealing out the cards were well-shaped and muscular. Somehow he looked very different, she could hardly explain how or why, from the men round him.

At last she moved round, so as to avoid being opposite to him.

Yes, she felt more comfortable now, and slowly, almost insensibly, the glamour of play began to steal over Sylvia Bailey's senses. She began to understand the at once very simple and, to the uninitiated, intricate game of Baccarat—to long, as Anna Wolsky longed, for the fateful nine, eight, five, and four to be turned up.

She had fifty francs in her purse, and she ached to risk a gold piece.

"Do you think I might put down ten francs?" she whispered to Anna.

And the other laughed, and exclaimed, "Yes, of course you can!"

Sylvia put down a ten-franc piece, and a moment later it had become twenty francs.

"Leave it on," murmured Anna, "and see what happens—"

Sylvia followed her friend's advice, and a larger gold piece was added to the two already there.

She took up the forty francs with a curious thrill of joy and fear.

But then an untoward little incident took place. One of the liveried men-servants stepped forward. "Has Madame got her card of membership?" he inquired smoothly.

Sylvia blushed painfully. No, she had not got a card of membership—and there had been an implied understanding that she was only to look on, not play.

She felt terribly ashamed—a very unusual feeling for Sylvia Bailey—and the gold pieces she held in her hand, for she had not yet put them in her purse, felt as if they burnt her.

But she found a friend, a defender in an unexpected quarter. The Count rose from the table. He said a few words in a low tone to the servant, and the man fell back.

"Of course, this young lady may play," he addressed Anna, "and as Banker I wish her all good luck! This is probably her first and her last visit to Lacville." He smiled pleasantly, and a little sadly. Sylvia noticed that he had a low, agreeable voice.

"Take her away, Madame, when she has won a little more! Do not give her time to lose what she has won."

He spoke exactly as if Sylvia was a child. She felt piqued, and Madame Wolsky stared at him rather haughtily. Still, she was grateful for his intervention.

"We thank you, Monsieur," she said stiffly. "But I think we have been here quite long enough."

He bowed, and again sat down.

"I will now take you a drive, Sylvia. We have had sufficient of this!"

Anna walked towards the door, and many were the curious glances now turned after the two friends.

"It will amuse you to see something of Lacville. As that gentleman said, I do not suppose you will ever come here again. And, as I shall spend most of my time in the Casino, I can very well afford to spare a little while out of it to-day!"

They made their way out of the great white building, Sylvia feeling oppressed, almost bewildered, by her first taste of gambling.

It was three o'clock, and very hot. They hailed one of the little open carriages which are among the innocent charms of Lacville.

"First you will go round the lake," said Madame Wolsky to the driver, "and then you will take us to the Pension Malfait, in l'Avenue des Acacias."

Under shady trees, bowling along sanded roads lined with pretty villas and châlets, they drove all round the lake, and more and more the place impressed Sylvia as might have done a charming piece of scene-painting.

All the people they passed on the road, in carriages, in motor-cars, and on foot, looked happy, prosperous, gay, and without a care in the world; and where in the morning there had been one boat, there were now five sailing on the blue, gleaming waters fringed with trees and flowering shrubs.

At last they once more found themselves close to the Casino. A steady stream of people was now pouring in through the great glass doors.

"This sort of thing will go on up till about nine this evening!" said Anna, smiling grimly. "Think, my dear—a hundred and twenty trains daily! That room in the Casino where I first saw you will be crammed to suffocation within an hour, and even the Club will be well filled, though I fancy the regular habitués of the club are rather apt to avoid Saturday and Sunday at Lacville. I myself, when living here, shall try to do something else on those two days. By the way—how dreadful that I should forget!—have you had a proper déjeuner?" she looked anxiously at Sylvia.

Sylvia laughed, and told something of her adventures at the Villa du Lac.

"The Villa du Lac? I have heard of it, but surely it's an extremely expensive hotel? The place I've chosen for myself is farther away from the Casino; but the distance will force me to take a walk every day, and that will be a very good thing. Last time I was at Monte Carlo I had a lodging right up in Monaco, and I found that a very much healthier plan than to live close to the Casino," Anna spoke quite seriously. "The Pension Malfait is really extraordinarily cheap for a place near Paris. I am only going to pay fifty-five francs a week, tout compris!"

They had now turned from the road encircling the lake, and were driving through leafy avenues which reminded Sylvia of a London suburb where she had once stayed.

The châlets and villas by which they passed were not so large nor so prosperous-looking as those that bordered the lake, but still many of them were pretty and fantastic-looking little houses, and the gardens were gay with flowers.

"I suppose no one lives here in the winter!" said Sylvia suddenly.

She had noticed, for in some ways she was very observant though in other ways strangely unseeing, that all the flowers were of the bedding-out varieties; there were luxuriant creepers, but not a single garden that she passed had that indefinable look of being an old or a well-tended garden.

"In the winter? Why, in the winter Lacville is an absolute desert," said Anna laughing. "You see, the Casino only has a summer Concession; it cannot open till April 15. Of course there are people who will tell you that Lacville is the plague-pit of Paris, but that's all nonsense! Lacville is neither better nor worse than other towns near the capital!"

The carriage had now drawn up before a large, plain, white house, across which was painted in huge, black letters, "Hôtel-Pension Malfait."

"This is the place I have found!" exclaimed Anna. "Would you care to come in and see the room I've engaged from next Monday week?"

Sylvia followed her into the house with curiosity and interest. Somehow she did not like the Pension Malfait, though it was clear that it had once been a handsome private mansion standing in large grounds of its own. The garden, however, had now been cut down to a small strip, and the whole place formed a great contrast to the gay and charming Villa du Lac.

What garden there was seemed uncared for, though an attempt had been made to make it look pretty with the aid of a few geraniums and marguerites.

M. Malfait, the proprietor of the Pension, whom Sylvia had already seen with Anna at the Casino, now came forward in the hall, and Sylvia compared him greatly to his disadvantage, to the merry M. Polperro.

"Madame has brought her friend?" he said eagerly, and staring at Sylvia as he spoke. "I hope that Madame's friend will come and stay with us too? I have a charming room which I could give this lady; but later on we shall be very full—full all the summer! The hot weather is a godsend for Lacville; for it drives the Parisians out from their unhealthy city."

He beckoned to his wife, a disagreeable-looking woman who was sitting in a little glass cage made in an angle of the square hall.

"Madame Wolsky has brought this good lady to see our Pension!" he exclaimed, "and perhaps she is also coming to stay with us—"

In vain Sylvia smilingly shook her head. She was made to go all over the large, rather gloomy house, and to peep into each of the bare, ugly bed-rooms.

That which Anna had engaged had a window looking over the back of the house; Sylvia thought it singularly cheerless. There was, however, a good arm-chair and a writing-table on which lay a new-looking blotter. It was the only bed-room containing such a luxury.

"An English lady was staying here not very long ago," observed M. Malfait, "and she bought that table and left it to me as a little gift when she went away. That was very gracious on her part!"

They glanced into the rather mournful-looking salon, of which the windows opened out on the tiny garden. And then M. Malfait led them proudly into the dining-room, with its one long table, running down the middle, on which at intervals were set dessert dishes filled with the nuts, grapes, and oranges of which Sylvia had already become so weary at the Hôtel de l'Horloge.

"My clientèle," said M. Malfait gravely, "is very select and chic. Those of my guests who frequent the Casino all belong to the Club!"

He stated the fact proudly, and Sylvia was amused to notice that in this matter he and mine host at the Villa du Lac apparently saw eye to eye. Both were eager to dissociate themselves from the ordinary gambler who lost or won a few francs in those of the gambling rooms open to the general public.

"Well," said Anna at last, "I suppose we had better leave now, but we might as well go on driving for about an hour, and then, when it is a little cooler, we will go back to Paris and be there in time for tea."

The driver was as good-natured as everyone else at Lacville seemed to be. He drove his fares away from the town, and so to the very outskirts of Lacville, where there were many charming bits of wild woodland and gardens up for sale.

"Even five years ago," he said, "much of this was forest, Mesdames; but now—well, Dame!—you can understand people are eager to sell. There are rumours that the Concession may be withdrawn from the Casino—that would be terrible, some say it would kill Lacville! It would be all the same to me, I should always find work elsewhere. But it makes everyone eager to sell—those, I mean, who have land at Lacville. There are others," continued the man—he had turned round on his seat, and the horse was going at a foot's pace—"who declare that it would be far better for the town—that there would be a more solid population established here—you understand, Mesdames, what I mean? The Lacville tradesmen would be as pleased, quite as pleased, or so some of them say; but, all the same, they are selling their land!"

When the two friends finally got back to the Hôtel de l'Horloge, Sylvia Bailey found that a letter, which had not been given to her that morning, contained the news that the English friends whom she had been expecting to join in Switzerland the following week had altered their plans, and were no longer going abroad.

CHAPTER V

Sylvia could hardly have said how it came about that she found herself established in the Villa du Lac only a week after her first visit to Lacville! But so it was, and she found the change a delightful one from every point of view.

Paris had suddenly become intolerably hot. As is the way with the Siren city when June is half-way through, the asphalt pavements radiated heat; the air was heavy, laden with strange, unpleasing odours; and even the trees, which form such delicious oases of greenery in the older quarters of the town were powdered with grey dust.

Also Anna Wolsky had become restless—quite unlike what she had been before that hour spent by her and by Sylvia Bailey in the Club at Lacville; she had gone back there three times, refusing, almost angrily, the company of her English friend. For a day or two Sylvia had thought seriously of returning to England, but she had let her pretty house at Market Dalling till the end of August; and, in spite of the heat, she did not wish to leave France.

Towards the end of the week Anna suddenly exclaimed:

"After all, why shouldn't you come out to Lacville, Sylvia? You can't go to Switzerland alone, and you certainly don't want to go on staying in Paris as Paris is now! I do not ask you to go to the Pension Malfait, but come to the Villa du Lac. You will soon make acquaintances in that sort of place—I mean," she added, "in your hotel, not in the town. We could always spend the mornings together—"

"—And I, too, could join the Club at the Casino," interjected Sylvia, smiling.

"No, no, I don't want you to do that!" exclaimed Anna hastily.

And then Sylvia, for some unaccountable reason, felt rather irritated. It was absurd of Anna to speak to her like that! Bill Chester, her trustee, and sometime lover, always treated her as if she was a child, and a rather naughty child, too; she would not allow Anna Wolsky to do so.

"I don't see why not!" she cried. "You yourself say that there is no harm in gambling if one can afford it."

This was how Sylvia Bailey came to find herself an inmate of the Villa du Lac at Lacville; and when once the owner of the Hôtel de l'Horloge had understood that in any case she meant to leave Paris, he had done all in his power to make her going to his relation, mine host of the Villa du Lac, easy and agreeable.

Sylvia learnt with surprise that she would have to pay very little more at the Villa du Lac than she had done at the Hôtel de l'Horloge; on the other hand, she could not there have the use of a sitting-room, for the good reason that there were no private sitting-rooms in the villa. But that, so she told herself, would be no hardship, and she could spend almost the whole of the day in the charming garden.

The two friends arrived at Lacville late in the afternoon, and on a Monday, that is on the quietest day of the week. And when Anna had left Sylvia at the Villa du Lac, driving off alone to her own humbler pension, the young Englishwoman, while feeling rather lonely, realised that M. Polperro had not exaggerated the charm of his hostelry.

Proudly mine host led Mrs. Bailey up the wide staircase into the spacious, airy room which had been prepared for her. "This was the bed-chamber of Madame la Comtesse de Para, the friend of the Empress Eugénie" he said.

The windows of the large, circular room, mirror-lined, and still containing the fantastic, rather showy decorations which dated from the Second Empire, overlooked the broad waters of the lake. Even now, though it was still daylight, certain romantic-natured couples had lit paper lanterns and hung them at the prows of their little sailing-boats.

The scene had a certain fairy-like beauty and stillness.

"Madame will find the Villa du Lac far more lively now" exclaimed M. Polperro cheerfully. "Last week I had only M. le Comte Paul de Virieu—no doubt Madame has heard of his brother-in-law, the Duc d'Eglemont?"

Sylvia smiled. "Yes, he won the Derby, a famous English race," she said; and then, simply because the landlord's love of talking was infectious, "And does the Count own horses, too?" she asked.

"Oh, no, Madame. He loves them, yes, and he is a fine horseman, but Count Paul, alas! has other things that interest and occupy him more than horses!"

After M. Polperro had bowed himself out, Sylvia sat down close to one of the open windows and looked out over the enchanting, and to her English eyes, unusual panorama spread out before her.

Yes, she had done well to come here, to a place of which, no doubt, many of her English friends would have thoroughly disapproved! But, after all, what was wrong about Lacville? Where, for the matter of that, was the harm of playing for money if one could afford to lose it?

Sylvia had hardly ever met so kind or so intelligent a woman as was her new friend, Anna Wolsky: and Anna—she made no secret of it at all—allowed playing for money to be her one absorbing interest in life.

As she thought of the Polish woman Sylvia felt sorry that she and her friend were in different pensions. It would have been so nice to have had her here, in the Villa du Lac. She felt rather lost without Anna, for she had become accustomed to the other's pleasant, stimulating companionship.

M. Polperro had said that dinner was at half-past seven. Sylvia got up from her chair by the window. She moved back into the room and put on a pretty white lace evening dress which she had not worn since she had been in France.

It would have been absurd to have appeared in such a gown in the little dining-room of the Hôtel de l'Horloge, which opened into the street; but the Villa du Lac was quite different.

As she saw herself reflected in one of the long mirrors let into the wall, Sylvia blushed and half-smiled. She had suddenly remembered the young man who had behaved, on that first visit of hers to the Villa du Lac, so much more discreetly than had all the other Frenchmen with whom she had been brought in temporary contact. She was familiar, through newspaper paragraphs, with the name of his brother-in-law, the French duke who had won the Derby. The Duc d'Eglemont, that was the racing French duke who had carried off the blue riband of the British Turf—the other name was harder to remember—then it came to her. Count Paul de Virieu. How kind and courteous he had been to her and her friend in the Club. She remembered him very vividly. Yes, though not exactly good-looking, he had fine eyes, and a clever, if not a very happy, face.

And then, on going down the broad, shallow staircase, and so through the large, oval hall into the dining-room, Sylvia Bailey saw that the man of whom she had been thinking was there, sitting very near to where she herself was now told that she was to sit. In the week that had gone by since Sylvia had paid her first visit to Lacville, the Villa had gradually filled up with people eager, like herself, to escape from the heat and dust of Paris, and the pleasant little table by the window had been appropriated by someone else.

When the young Englishwoman came into the dining-room, the Comte de Virieu got up from his chair, and clicking his heels together, bowed low and gravely.

She had never seen a man do that before. And it looked so funny! Sylvia felt inclined to burst out laughing. But all she did was to nod gravely, and the Count, sitting down, took no further apparent notice of her.

There were a good many people in the large room; parties of two, three, and four, talking merrily together, as is the way with French people at their meals. No one was alone save the Comte de Virieu and herself. Sylvia wondered if he felt as lonely as she did.

Towards the end of dinner the host came in and beamed on his guests; then he walked across to where Mrs. Bailey sat by herself. "I hope Madame is satisfied with her dinner," he said pleasantly. "Madame must always tell me if there is anything she does not like."

He called the youngest of the three waitresses. "Félicie! You must look very well after Madame," he said solemnly. "Make her comfortable, attend to her slightest wish"—and then he chuckled—"This is my niece," he said, "a very good girl! She is our adopted daughter. Madame will only have to ask her for anything she wants."

Sylvia felt much happier, and no longer lonely. It was all rather absurd—but it was all very pleasant! She had never met an hotel keeper like little Polperro, one at once so familiar and so inoffensive in manner.

"Thank you so much," she said, "but I am more than comfortable! And after dinner I shall go to the Casino to meet my friend, Madame Wolsky."

After they had finished dinner most of M. Polperro's guests streamed out into the garden; and there coffee was served to them on little round iron tables dotted about on the broad green lawn and sanded paths.

One or two of the ladies spoke a kindly word to Sylvia as they passed by her, but each had a friend or friends, and she was once more feeling lonely and deserted when suddenly Count Paul de Virieu walked across to where she was sitting by herself.

Again he clicked his heels together, and again he bowed low. But already Sylvia was getting used to these strange foreign ways, and she no longer felt inclined to laugh; in fact, she rather liked the young Frenchman's grave, respectful manner.

"If, as I suppose, Madame, seeing that you have come back to Lacville—"

Sylvia looked up with surprise painted on her fair face, for the Count was speaking in English, and it was extremely good, almost perfect English.

"—and you wish to join the Club at the Casino, I hope, Madame, that you will allow me to have the honour of proposing you as a member."

He waited a moment, and then went on: "It is far better for a lady to be introduced by someone who is already a member, than for the affair to be managed"—he slightly lowered his voice—"by an hotel keeper. I am well known to the Casino authorities. I have been a member of the Club for some time—"

He stood still gazing thoughtfully down into her face.

"But I am not yet sure that I shall join the Club," said Sylvia, hesitatingly.

He looked—was it relieved or sorry?

"I beg your pardon, Madame! I misunderstood. I thought you told M. Polperro just now in the dining-room that you were going to the Casino this evening."

Sylvia felt somewhat surprised. It was odd that he should have overheard her words to M. Polperro, amid all the chatter of their fellow-guests.

"Yes, I am going to the Casino," she said frankly, "but only to meet a friend of mine there, the lady with whom I was the other day when you so kindly interfered to save us, or rather to save me, from being ignominiously turned out of the Club." And then she added, a little shyly, "Won't you sit down?"

Again the Comte de Virieu bowed low before her, and then he sat down.

"I fear you will not be allowed to go into the Club this time unless you become a member. They have to be very strict in these matters; to allow a stranger in the Club at all is a legal infraction. The Casino authorities might be fined for doing so."

"How well you speak English!" exclaimed Sylvia, abruptly and irrelevantly.

"I was at school in England," he said, simply, "at a Catholic College called Beaumont, near Windsor; but now I do not go there as often as I should like to do."

And then, scarcely knowing how it came about, Sylvia fell into easy, desultory, almost intimate talk with this entire stranger. But there was something very agreeable in his simple serious manners.

After a while Sylvia suddenly remembered that the Count had thrown his cigarette away before speaking to her.

"Won't you smoke?" she said.

"Are you sure you don't mind, Madame?"

"No, of course I don't mind!" and she was just going to add that her husband had been a great smoker, when some feeling she could not have analysed to herself made her alter her words to "My father smoked all day long—"

The Count got up and went off towards the house. Sylvia supposed he had gone to get his cigarette-case; but a moment later he came back and sat down by her again. And then very soon out came the host's pretty little niece with a shawl over her arm. "I have brought Madame a shawl," said the girl, smiling, "for it's getting a little cold," and Sylvia felt touched. How very kind French people were—how kind and how thoughtful!

It struck half-past eight. Mrs. Bailey and the Comte de Virieu had been talking for quite a long time.

Sylvia jumped up. "I must go now," she cried, a little regretfully. "I promised to meet my friend in the hall of the Casino at half-past eight. She must be there waiting for me, now."

"If you will allow me to do so, I will escort you to the Casino," said the Count.

Sylvia ran upstairs to put on her hat and gloves. On the table which did duty for a dressing-table there was a small nosegay of flowers in a glass of water. It had not been there before she had come down to dinner.

As she put on a large black tulle hat she told herself with a happy smile that Lacville was an enchanting, a delightful place, and that she already felt quite at home here!

The Comte de Virieu was waiting for her in the hall.

"I think I ought to introduce myself to you, Madame," he said solemnly. "My name is Paul de Virieu."

"And mine is Sylvia Bailey," she said, a little breathlessly.

As they were hurrying along the short piece of road which led to the lane in which the Casino of Lacville is situated, the Count said suddenly, "Will you pardon me, Madame, if I take the liberty of saying that you should arrange for your friend to call for you on those evenings that you intend to spend at the Casino? It is not what English people call 'proper' for you to go to the Casino alone, or only accompanied by a stranger—for I, alas! am still a stranger to you."

There was no touch of coquetry or flirtation in the voice in which he said those words. Sylvia blushed violently, but she did not feel annoyed, only queerly touched by his solicitude for—well, she supposed it was for her reputation.

"You see, Madame," he went on soberly, "you look very young—I mean, pardon me, you are very young, and I will confess to you that the first time I saw you I thought you were a 'Miss.' Of course, I saw at once that you were English."

"An English girl would hardly have come all by herself to Lacville!" said Sylvia a little flippantly.

"Oh, Madame, English young ladies do such strange things!"

Sylvia wondered if the Count were not over-particular. Was Lacville the sort of place in which a woman could not walk a few yards by herself? It looked such a happy, innocent sort of spot.

"Perhaps I do not make myself clear," went on Count Paul.

He spoke very quickly, and in a low voice, for they were now approaching the door of the Casino. "Not very long ago a lady had her hand-bag snatched from her within a few yards of the police-station, in the centre of the town. Everyone comes here to make or to lose money—"

"But most of the people look so quiet and respectable," she said smiling.

"That is true, but there are the exceptions. Lacville contains more exceptions than do most places, Madame."

They were now in the hall of the Casino. Yes, there was Anna Wolsky looking eagerly at the great glass doors.

"Anna? Anna? Here I am! I'm so sorry I'm late!"

Sylvia turned to introduce the Comte de Virieu to Madame Wolsky, but he was already bowing stiffly, and before she could speak he walked on, leaving Mrs. Bailey with her friend.

"I see you've already made one acquaintance, Sylvia," said the Polish lady dryly.

"That's the man who was so kind the last time we were here together. He is staying at the Villa du Lac," Sylvia answered, a little guiltily. "His name is Count Paul de Virieu."

"Yes, I am aware of that; I know him by sight quite well," Anna said quickly.

"And he has offered to propose me as a member of the Club if I wish to join," added Sylvia.

"I shall propose you—of course!" exclaimed Anna Wolsky. "But I do not think it is worth worrying about your membership to-night. We can spend the evening downstairs, in the public Salle des Jeux. I should not care to leave you alone there, even on a Monday evening."

"You talk as if I were sugar or salt that would melt!" said Sylvia, a little vexed.

"One has to be very careful in a place like Lacville," said Anna shortly. "There are all sorts of queer people gathered together here on the look-out for an easy way of making money." She turned an affectionate look on her friend. "You are not only very pretty, my dear Sylvia, but you look what the people here probably regard as being of far more consequence, that is, opulent."

"So I am," said Sylvia gaily, "opulent and very, very happy, dear Anna! I am so glad that you brought me here, and first made me acquainted with this delightful place! I am sure Switzerland would not have been half as amusing as Lacville—"

The public gambling room was much quieter and emptier than it had been on the Saturday when Sylvia had first seen it. But all the people playing there, both those sitting at the table and those who stood in serried ranks behind them, looked as if they were engaged on some serious undertaking.

They did not appear, as the casual holiday crowd had done, free from care. There was comparatively little talking among them, and each round of the monotonous game was got through far quicker than had been the case the week before. Money was risked, lost, or gained, with extraordinary swiftness and precision.

A good many of the people there, women as well as men, glanced idly for a moment at the two newcomers, but they soon looked away again, intent on their play.

Sylvia felt keenly interested. She could have stopped and watched the scene for hours without wanting to play herself; but Anna Wolsky soon grew restless, and started playing. Even risking a few francs was better to her than not gambling at all!

"It's an odd thing," she said in a low voice, "but I don't see here any of the people I'm accustomed to see at Monte Carlo. As a rule, whenever one goes to this kind of place one meets people one has seen before. We gamblers are a caste—a sect part!"

"I can't bear to hear you call yourself a gambler," said Sylvia in a low voice.

Anna laughed good-humouredly.

"Believe me, my dear, there is not the difference you apparently think there is between a gambler and the man who has never touched a card."

Anna Wolsky looked round her as she spoke with a searching glance, and then she suddenly exclaimed,

"Yes, I do know someone here after all! That funny-looking couple over there were at Aix-les-Bains all last summer."

"Which people do you mean?" asked Sylvia eagerly.

"Don't you see that long, thin man who is so queerly dressed—and his short, fat wife? A dreadful thing happened to them—a great friend of theirs, a Russian, was drowned in Lac Bourget. It made a great deal of talk in Aix at the time it happened."

Sylvia Bailey looked across the room. She was able to pick out in a moment the people Anna meant, and perhaps because she was in good spirits to-night, she smiled involuntarily at their rather odd appearance.

Standing just behind the croupier—whose task it is to rake in and to deal out the money—was a short, stout, dark woman, dressed in a bright purple gown, and wearing a pale blue bonnet particularly unbecoming to her red, massive face. She was not paying much attention to the play, though now and again she put a five-franc piece onto the green baize. Instead, her eyes were glancing round restlessly this way and that, almost as if she were seeking for someone.

Behind her, in strong contrast to herself, was a tall, thin, lanky man, to Sylvia's English eyes absurdly as well as unsuitably dressed in a grey alpaca suit and a shabby Panama hat. In his hand he held open a small book, in which he noted down all the turns of the game. Unlike his short, stout wife, this tall, thin man seemed quite uninterested in the people about him, and Sylvia could see his lips moving, his brows frowning, as if he were absorbed in some intricate and difficult calculation.

The couple looked different from the people about them; in a word, they did not look French.

"The man—their name is Wachner—only plays on a system," whispered Anna. "He is in fact what I call a System Maniac. That is why he keeps noting down the turns in his little book. That sort of gambler ought never to leave Monte Carlo. It is only at Monte Carlo—that is to say, at Roulette—that such a man ever gets a real chance of winning anything. I should have expected them to belong to the Club, and not to trouble over this kind of play!"

Even as she spoke, Anna slightly inclined her head, and the woman at whom they were both looking smiled broadly, showing her strong white teeth as she did so; and then, as her eyes travelled from Anna Wolsky to Anna's companion, they became intent and questioning.

Madame Wachner, in spite of her unwieldy form, and common, showy clothes, was fond of beautiful things, and especially fond of jewels. She was wondering whether the pearls worn by the lovely young Englishwoman standing opposite were real or sham.

The two friends did not stay very long in the Casino on that first evening. Sylvia drove Anna to the Pension Malfait, and then she came back alone to the Villa du Lac.

Before drawing together the curtains of her bed-room windows, Sylvia Bailey stood for some minutes looking out into the warm moonlit night.

On the dark waters of the lake floated miniature argosies, laden with lovers seeking happiness—ay, and perhaps finding it, too.

The Casino was outlined with fairy lamps; the scene was full of glamour, and of mysterious beauty. More than ever Sylvia was reminded of an exquisite piece of scene painting, and it seemed to her as if she were the heroine of a romantic opera—and the hero, with his ardent eyes and melancholy, intelligent face, was Count Paul de Virieu.

She wondered uneasily why Anna Wolsky had spoken of the Count as she had done—was it with dislike or only contempt?

Long after Sylvia was in bed she could hear the tramping made by the feet of those who were leaving the Casino and hurrying towards the station; but she did not mind the sound. All was so strange, new, and delightful, and she fell asleep and dreamt pleasant dreams.

CHAPTER VI

On waking the next morning, Sylvia Bailey forgot completely for a moment where she was.

She looked round the large, airy room, which was so absolutely unlike the small bed-room she had occupied in the Hôtel de l'Horloge, with a sense of bewilderment and surprise.

And then suddenly she remembered! Why of course she was at Lacville; and this delightful, luxurious room had been furnished and arranged for the lady-in-waiting and friend of the Empress Eugénie. The fact gave an added touch of romance to the Hôtel du Lac.

A ray of bright sunlight streamed in through the curtains she had pinned together the night before. And her travelling clock told her that it was not yet six. But Sylvia jumped out of bed, and, drawing back the curtains, she looked out, and across the lake.

The now solitary expanse of water seemed to possess a new beauty in the early morning sunlight, and the white Casino, of which the minarets were reflected in its blue depths, might have been a dream palace. Nothing broke the intense stillness but the loud, sweet twittering of the birds in the trees which surrounded the lake.

But soon the spell was broken. When the six strokes of the hour chimed out from the old parish church which forms the centre of the town of Lacville, as if by enchantment there rose sounds of stir both indoors and out.

A woman came out of the lodge of the Villa du Lac, and slowly opened the great steel and gilt gates.

Sylvia heard the rush of bath water, even the queer click-click of a shower bath. M. Polperro evidently insisted on an exceptional standard of cleanliness for his household.

Sylvia felt fresh and well. The languor induced by the heat of Paris had left her. There seemed no reason why she should not get up too, and even go out of doors if so the fancy pleased her.

She had just finished dressing when there came curious sounds from the front of the Villa, and again she went over to her window.

A horse was being walked up and down on the stones of the courtyard in front of the horseshoe stairway which led up to the hall door. It was not yet half-past six. Who could be going to ride at this early hour of the morning?

Soon her unspoken question was answered; for the Comte de Virieu, clad in riding breeches and a black jersey, came out of the house, and close on his heels trotted M. Polperro, already wearing his white chef's cap and apron.

Sylvia could hear his "M'sieur le Comte" this, and "M'sieur le Comte" that, and she smiled a little to herself. The owner of the Hôtel du Lac was very proud of his noble guest.

The Comte de Virieu was also laughing and talking; he was more animated than she had yet seen him. Sylvia told herself that he looked very well in his rather odd riding dress.

Waving a gay adieu to mine host, he vaulted into the saddle, and then rode out of the gates, and so sharply to the left.

Sylvia wondered if he were going for a ride in the Forest of Montmorency, which, in her lying guide-book, was mentioned as the principal attraction of Lacville.

There came a knock at the door, and Sylvia, calling out "Come in!" was surprised, and rather amused, to see that it was M. Polperro himself who opened it.

"I have come to ask if Madame has slept well," he observed, "and also to know if she would like an English breakfast? If yes, it shall be laid in the dining-room, unless Madame would rather have it up here."

"I would much rather come downstairs to breakfast," said Sylvia; "but I do not want anything yet, M. Polperro. It will do quite well if I have breakfast at half-past eight or nine."

She unpacked her trunks, and as she put her things away it suddenly struck her that she meant to stay at Lacville for some time. It was an interesting, a new, even a striking experience, this of hers; and though she felt rather lost without Anna Wolsky's constant presence and companionship, she was beginning to find it pleasant to be once more her own mistress.

She sat down and wrote some letters—the sort of letters that can be written or not as the writer feels inclined. Among them was a duty letter to her trustee, Bill Chester, telling him of her change of address, and of her change of plan.

The people with whom she had been going to Switzerland were friends of Bill Chester too, and so it was doubtful now whether he would go abroad at all.

And all the time Sylvia was writing there was at the back of her mind a curious, unacknowledged feeling that she was waiting for something to happen, that there was something pleasant for her to look forward to....

And when at last she went down into the dining-room, and Paul de Virieu came in, Sylvia suddenly realised, with a sense of curious embarrassment, what it was she had been waiting for and looking forward to. It was her meeting with the Comte de Virieu.

"I hope my going out so early did not disturb you," he said, in his excellent English. "I saw you at your window."

Sylvia shook her head, smiling.

"I had already been awake for at least half an hour," she answered.

"I suppose you ride? Most of the Englishwomen I knew as a boy rode, and rode well."

"My father was very anxious I should ride, and as a child I was well taught, but I have not had much opportunity of riding since I grew up."

Sylvia reddened faintly, for she fully expected the Count to ask her if she would ride with him, and she had already made up her mind to say "No," though to say "Yes" would be very pleasant!

But he did nothing of the sort. Even at this early hour of their acquaintance it struck Sylvia how unlike the Comte de Virieu's manner to her was to that of the other young men she knew. While his manner was deferential, even eager, yet there was not a trace of flirtation in it. Also the Count had already altered all Sylvia Bailey's preconceived notions of Frenchmen.

Sylvia had supposed a Frenchman's manner to a woman to be almost invariably familiar, in fact, offensively familiar. She had had the notion that a pretty young woman—it would, of course, have been absurd for her to have denied, even to herself, that she was very pretty—must be careful in her dealing with foreigners, and she believed it to be a fact that a Frenchman always makes love to an attractive stranger, even on the shortest acquaintance!

This morning, and she was a little piqued that it was so, Sylvia had to admit to herself that the Comte de Virieu treated her much as he might have done some old lady in whom he took a respectful interest....

And yet twice during the half-hour her breakfast lasted she looked up to see his blue eyes fixed full on her with an earnest, inquiring gaze, and she realised that it was not at all the kind of gaze Paul de Virieu would have turned on an old lady.

They got up from their respective tables at the same moment. He opened the door for her, and then, after a few minutes, followed her out into the garden.

"Have you yet visited the potager?" he asked, deferentially.

Sylvia looked at him, puzzled. "Potager" was quite a new French word to her.

"I think you call it the kitchen-garden." A smile lit up his face. "The people who built the Villa du Lac a matter of fifty years ago were very fond of gardening. I think it might amuse you to see the potager. Allow me to show it you."

They were now walking side by side. It was a delicious day, and the dew still glistened on the grass and leaves. Sylvia thought it would be very pleasant, and also instructive, to see a French kitchen-garden.

"Strange to say when I was a child I was often at the Villa du Lac, for the then owner was a distant cousin of my mother. He and his kind wife allowed me to come here for my convalescence after a rather serious illness when I was ten years old. My dear mother did not like me to be far from Paris, so I was sent to Lacville."

"What a curious place to send a child to!" exclaimed Sylvia.

"Ah, but Lacville was extremely different from what it is now, Madame. True, there was the lake, where Parisians used to come out each Sunday afternoon to fish and boat in a humble way, and there were a few villas built round the lake. But you must remember that in those prehistoric days there was no Casino! It is the Casino which has transformed Lacville into what we now see."

"Then we have reason to bless the Casino!" cried Sylvia, gaily.

They had now left behind them the wide lawn immediately behind the Villa du Lac, and were walking by a long, high wall. The Count pushed open a narrow door set in an arch in the wall, and Sylvia walked through into one of the largest and most delightful kitchen-gardens she had ever seen.

It was brilliant with colour and scent; the more homely summer flowers filled the borders, while, at each place where four paths met, a round, stone-rimmed basin, filled with water to the brim, gave a sense of pleasant coolness.

The farther end of the walled garden was bounded by a stone orangery, a building dating from the eighteenth century, and full of the stately grace of a vanished epoch.

"What a delightful place!" Sylvia exclaimed. "But this garden must cost M. Polperro a great deal of money to keep up—"

The Comte de Virieu laughed.

"Far from it! Our clever host hires out his potager to a firm of market gardeners, part of the bargain being that they allow him to have as much fruit and vegetables as he requires throughout the year. Why, the potager of the Villa du Lac supplies the whole of Lacville with fruit and flowers! When I was a child I thought this part of the garden paradise, and I spent here my happiest hours."

"It must be very odd for you to come back and stay in the Villa now that it is an hotel."

"At first it seemed very strange," he answered gravely. "But now I have become quite used to the feeling."

They walked on for awhile along one of the narrow flower-bordered paths.

"Would you care to go into the orangery?" he said. "There is not much to see there now, for all the orange-trees are out of doors. Still, it is a quaint, pretty old building."

The orangery of the Villa du Lac was an example of that at once artificial and graceful eighteenth-century architecture which, perhaps because of its mingled formality and delicacy, made so distinguished and attractive a setting to feminine beauty. It remained, the only survival of the dependencies of a château sacked and burned in the Great Revolution, more than half a century before the Villa du Lac was built.

The high doors were wide open, and Sylvia walked in. Though all the pot-plants and half-hardy shrubs were sunning themselves in the open-air, the orangery did not look bare, for every inch of the inside walls had been utilised for growing grapes and peaches.

There was a fountain set in the centre of the stone floor, and near the fountain was a circular seat.

"Let us sit down," said Paul de Virieu suddenly. But when Sylvia Bailey sat down he did not come and sit by her, instead he so placed himself that he looked across at her slender, rounded figure, and happy smiling face.

"Are you thinking of staying long at Lacville, Madame?" he asked abruptly.

"I don't know," she answered hesitatingly. "It will depend on my friend Madame Wolsky's plans. If we both like it, I daresay we shall stay three or four weeks."

There fell what seemed to Sylvia a long silence between them. The Frenchman was gazing at her with a puzzled, thoughtful look.

Suddenly he got up, and after taking a turn up and down the orangery, he came and stood before her.

"Mrs. Bailey!" he exclaimed. "Will you permit me to be rather impertinent?"

Sylvia reddened violently. The question took her utterly by surprise. But the Comte de Virieu's next words at once relieved, and yes, it must be admitted, chagrined her.

"I ask you, Madame, to leave Lacville! I ask permission to tell you frankly and plainly that it is not a place to which you ought to have been brought."

He spoke with great emphasis.

Sylvia looked up at him. She was bewildered, and though not exactly offended, rather hurt.

"But why?" she asked plaintively. "Why should I not stay at Lacville?"

"Oh, well, there can be no harm in your staying on a few days if you are desirous of doing so. But Lacville is not a place where I should care for my own sister to come and stay." He went on, speaking much quicker—"Indeed, I will say more! I will tell you that Lacville may seem a paradise to you, but that it is a paradise full of snakes."

"Snakes?" repeated Sylvia slowly. "You mean, of course, human snakes?"

He bowed gravely.

"Every town where reigns the Goddess of play attracts reptiles, Madame, as the sun attracts lizards! It is not the game that does so, or even the love of play in the Goddess's victims; no, it is the love of gold!"

Sylvia noticed that he had grown curiously pale.

"Lacville as a gambling centre counts only next to Monte Carlo. But whereas many people go to Monte Carlo for health, and for various forms of amusement, people only come here in order to play, and to see others play. The Casino, which doubtless appears to you a bright, pretty place, has been the scene and the cause of many a tragedy. Do you know how Paris regards Lacville?" he asked searchingly.

"No—yes," Sylvia hesitated. "You see I never heard of Lacville till about a week ago." Innate honesty compelled her to add, "But I have heard that the Paris trades-people don't like Lacville."

"Let me tell you one thing," the Count spoke with extraordinary seriousness. "Every tradesman in Paris, without a single exception, has signed a petition imploring the Government to suspend the Gambling Concession!"

"What an extraordinary thing!" exclaimed Sylvia, and she was surprised indeed.

"Pardon me, it is not at all extraordinary. A great deal of the money which would otherwise go into the pockets of these tradesmen goes now to enrich the anonymous shareholders of the Casino of Lacville! Of course, Paris hotel-keepers are not in quite the same position as are the other Parisian trades-people. Lacville does not do them much harm, for the place is so near Paris that foreigners, if they go there at all, generally go out for the day. Only the most confirmed gambler cares actually to live at Lacville."

He looked significantly at Sylvia, and she felt a wave of hot colour break over her face.

"Yes, I know what you must be thinking, and it is, indeed, the shameful truth! I, Madame, have the misfortune to be that most miserable and most God-forsaken of living beings, a confirmed gambler."

The Count spoke in a tone of stifled pain, almost anger, and Sylvia gazed up at his stern, sad face with pity and concern filling her kind heart.

"I will tell you my story in a few words," he went on, and then he sat down by her, and began tracing with his stick imaginary patterns on the stone floor.

"I was destined for what I still regard as the most agreeable career in the world—that of diplomacy. You see how I speak English? Well, Madame, I speak German and Spanish equally well. And then, most unhappily for me, my beloved mother died, and I inherited from her a few thousand pounds. I felt very miserable, and I happened to be at the moment idle. A friend persuaded me to go to Monte Carlo. That fortnight, Madame, changed my life—made me what the English call 'an idle good-for-nothing.' Can you wonder that I warn you against staying at Lacville?"

Sylvia was touched, as well as surprised, by his confidences. His words breathed sincerity, and the look of humiliation and pain on his face had deepened. He looked white and drawn.

"It is very kind of you to tell me this, and I am very much obliged to you for your warning," she said in a low tone.

But the Comte de Virieu went on as if he hardly heard her words.

"The lady with whom you first came to Lacville—I mean the Polish lady—is well known to me by sight. For the last three years I have seen her at Monte Carlo in the winter, and at Spa and Aix-les-Bains in the summer. Of course I was not at all surprised to see her turn up here, but I confess, Madame, that I was very much astonished to see with her a"—he hesitated a moment—"a young English lady. You would, perhaps, be offended if I were to tell you exactly what I felt when I saw you at the Casino!"

"I do not suppose I should be offended," said Sylvia softly.

"I felt, Madame, as if I saw a lily growing in a field of high, rank, evil-smelling—nay, perhaps I should say, poisonous—weeds."

"But I cannot go away now!" cried Sylvia. She was really impressed—very uncomfortably impressed—by his earnest words. "It would be most unkind to my friend, Madame Wolsky. Surely, it is possible to stay at Lacville, and even to play a little, without anything very terrible happening?" She looked at him coaxingly, anxiously, as a child might have done.

But Sylvia was not a child; she was a very lovely young woman. Comte Paul de Virieu's heart began to beat.

But, bah! This was absurd! His day of love and love-making lay far, far behind him. He rose and walked towards the door.

In speaking to her as he had forced himself to speak, the Frenchman had done an unselfish and kindly action. Sylvia's gentle and unsophisticated charm had touched him deeply, and so he had given her what he knew to be the best possible advice.

"I am not so foolish as to pretend that the people who come and play in the Casino of Lacville are all confirmed gamblers," he said, slowly. "We French take our pleasures lightly, Madame, and no doubt there is many an excellent Parisian bourgeois who comes here and makes or loses his few francs, and gets no harm from it. But, still, I swore to myself that I would warn you of the danger—"

They went out into the bright sunshine again, and Sylvia somehow felt as if she had made a friend—a real friend—in the Comte de Virieu. It was a curious sensation, and one that gave her more pleasure than she would have cared to own even to herself.

Most of the men she had met since she became a widow treated her as an irresponsible being. Many of them tried to flirt with her for the mere pleasure of flirting with so pretty a woman; others, so she was resentfully aware, had only become really interested in her when they became aware that she had been left by her husband with an income of two thousand pounds a year. She had had several offers of marriage since her widowhood, but not one of the men who had come and said he loved her had confessed as much about himself as this stranger had done.

She was the more touched and interested because the Frenchman's manner was extremely reserved. Even in the short time she had been at the Villa du Lac, Sylvia had realised that though the Count was on speaking terms with most of his fellow-guests, he seemed intimate with none of the people whose happy chatter had filled the dining-room the night before.

Just before going back into the Villa, Sylvia stopped short; she fixed her large ingenuous eyes on the Count's face.

"I want to thank you again," she said diffidently, "for your kindness in giving me this warning. You know we in England have a proverb, 'Forewarned is forearmed.' Well, believe me, I will not forget what you have said, and—and I am grateful for your confidence. Of course, I regard it as quite private."

The Count looked at her for a moment in silence, and then he said very deliberately,

"I am afraid the truth about me is known to all those good enough to concern themselves with my affairs. I am sure, for instance, that your Polish friend is well aware of it! You see before you a man who has lost every penny he owned in the world, who does not know how to work, and who is living on the charity of relations."

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.

Here at the Pension Malfait, the clientèle was French. All was loud talking, bustle, and laughter. The large house contained several young men who had daily work in Paris. Others, like Madame Wolsky, were at Lacville in order to indulge their passion for play, and quite a number of people came in simply for meals.

Among these last, rather to Sylvia's surprise, were Monsieur and Madame Wachner, the middle-aged couple whom Anna Wolsky had pointed out as having been at Aix-les-Bains the year before, at the same time as she was herself.

The husband and wife were now sitting almost exactly opposite Anna and Sylvia at the narrow table d'hôte, and again a broad, sunny smile lit up the older woman's face when she looked across at the two friends.

"We meet again!" she exclaimed in a guttural voice, and then in French, addressing Madame Wolsky, "This is not very much like Aix-les-Bains, is it, Madame?"

Anna shook her head.

"Still it is a pretty place, Lacville, and cheaper than one would think." She leant across the table, and continued in a confidential undertone: "As for us—my husband and I—we have taken a small villa; he has grown so tired of hotels."

"But surely you had a villa at Aix?" said Anna, in a surprised tone.

"Yes, we had a villa there, certainly. But then a very sad affair happened to us—" she sighed. "You may have heard of it?" and she fixed her small, intensely bright eyes inquiringly on Anna.

Anna bent her head.

"Yes, I heard all about it" she said gravely. "You mean about your friend who was drowned in the lake? It must have been a very distressing thing for you and your husband."

"Yes, indeed! He never can bear to speak of it."

And Sylvia, looking over at the man sitting just opposite to herself, saw a look of unease come over his sallow face. He was eating his omelette steadily, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

"Ami Fritz!" cried his wife, turning suddenly to him, and this time she spoke English, "Say, 'How d'you do,' to this lady! You will remember that we used to see 'er at Aix, in the Casino there?"

"Ami Fritz" bowed his head, but remained silent.

"Yes," his wife went on, volubly, "that sad affair made Aix very unpleasant to us! After that we spent the winter in various pensions, and then, instead of going back to Aix, we came 'ere. So far, I am quite satisfied with Lacville."

Though she spoke with a very bad accent and dropped her aitches, her English was quick and colloquial.

"Lacville is a cosy, 'appy place!" she cried, and this time she smiled full at Sylvia, and Sylvia told herself that the woman's face, if very plain, was like a sunflower,—so broad, so kindly, so good-humoured!

When déjeuner was over, the four had coffee together, and the melancholy Monsieur Wachner, who was so curiously unlike his bright, vivacious wife, at last broke into eager talk, for he and Anna Wolsky had begun to discuss different gambling systems. His face lighted up; it was easy to see what interested and stimulated this long, lanky man whose wife addressed him constantly as "Ami Fritz."

"Now 'e is what the English call 'obby-'orse riding," she exclaimed, with a loud laugh. "To see 'im in all 'is glory you should see my Fritz at Monte Carlo!" she was speaking to Sylvia. "There 'as never been a system invented in connection with that devil-game, Roulette, that L'Ami Fritz does not know, and that 'e 'as not—at some time or other—played more to 'is satisfaction than to mine!" But she spoke very good-humouredly. "'E cannot ring many changes on Baccarat, and I do not often allow 'im to play downstairs. No, no, that is too dangerous! That is for children and fools!"

Sylvia was still too ignorant of play to understand the full significance of Madame Wachner's words, but she was vaguely interested, though she could not understand one word of the eager talk between Anna and the man.

"Let us leave them at it!" exclaimed the older woman, suddenly. "It will be much nicer in the garden, Madame, for it is not yet too 'ot for out of doors. By the way, I forgot to tell you my name. That was very rude of me! My name is Wachner—Sophie Wachner, at your service."

"And my name is Bailey—Sylvia Bailey."

"Ah, I thought so—you are a Mees!"

"No," said Sylvia gravely, "I am a widow."

Madame Wachner's face became very serious.

"Ah," she said, sympathetically, "that is sad—very sad for one so young and so beautiful!"

Sylvia smiled. Madame Wachner was certainly a kindly, warm-hearted sort of woman.

They walked out together into the narrow garden, and soon Madame Wachner began to amuse her companion by lively, shrewd talk, and they spent a pleasant half hour pacing up and down.

The Wachners seemed to have travelled a great deal about the world and especially in several of the British Colonies.

It was in New Zealand that Madame Wachner had learnt to speak English: "My 'usband, 'e was in business there," she said vaguely.

"And you?" she asked at last, fixing her piercing eyes on the pretty Englishwoman, and allowing them to travel down till they rested on the milky row of perfectly-matched pearls.

"Oh, this is my first visit to France," answered Sylvia, "and I am enjoying it very much indeed."

"Then you 'ave not gambled for money yet?" observed Madame Wachner. "In England they are too good to gamble!" She spoke sarcastically, but Sylvia did not know that.

"I never in my life played for money till last week, and then I won thirty francs!"

"Ah! Then now surely you will join the Club?"

"Yes," said Sylvia a little awkwardly. "I suppose I shall join the Club. You see, my friend is so fond of play."

"I believe you there!" cried the other, familiarly. "We used to watch Madame Wolsky at Aix—my 'usband and I. It seems so strange that there we never spoke to 'er, and that now we seem to know 'er already so much better than we did in all the weeks we were together at Aix! But there"—she sighed a loud, heaving sigh—"we 'ad a friend—a dear young friend—with us at Aix-les-Bains."

"Yes, I know," said Sylvia, sympathisingly.

"You know?" Madame Wachner looked at her quickly. "What is it that you know, Madame?"

"Madame Wolsky told me about it. Your friend was drowned, was he not? It must have been very sad and dreadful for you and your husband."

"It was terrible!" said Madame Wachner vehemently. "Terrible!"

The hour in the garden sped by very quickly, and Sylvia was rather sorry when it came to be time to start for the Casino.

"Look here!" cried Madame Wachner suddenly. "Why should not L'Ami Fritz escort Madame Wolsky to the Casino while you and I take a pretty drive? I am so tired of that old Casino—and you will be so tired of it soon, too!" she exclaimed in an aside to Sylvia.

Sylvia looked questioningly at Anna.

"Yes, do take a drive, dear. You have plenty of time, for I intend to spend all this afternoon and evening at the Casino," said Madame Wolsky, quickly, in answer to Sylvia's look. "It will do quite well if you come there after you have had your tea. My friend will never go without her afternoon tea;" she turned to Madame Wachner.

"I, too, love afternoon tea!" cried Madame Wachner, in a merry tone. "Then that is settled! You and I will take a drive, and then we will 'ave tea and then go to the Casino."

Mrs. Bailey accompanied her friend upstairs while Anna put on her things and got out her money.

"You will enjoy a drive on this hot day, even with that funny old woman," said Madame Wolsky, affectionately. "And meanwhile I will get your membership card made out for the Club. If you like to do so, you might have a little gamble this evening. But I do not want my sweet English friend to become as fond of play as I am myself"—there crept a sad note into her voice. "However, I do not think there is any fear of that!"

When the two friends came downstairs again, they found Monsieur and Madame Wachner standing close together and speaking in a low voice. As she came nearer to them Sylvia saw that they were so absorbed in each other that they did not see her, and she heard the man saying in a low, angry voice, in French: "There is nothing to be done here at all, Sophie! It is foolish of us to waste our time like this!" And then Madame Wachner answered quickly, "You are always so gloomy, so hopeless! I tell you there is something to be done. Leave it to me!"

Then, suddenly becoming aware that Sylvia was standing beside her, the old woman went on: "My 'usband, Madame, always says there is nothing to be done! You see, 'e is tired of 'is last system, and 'e 'as not yet invented another. But, bah! I say to 'im that no doubt luck will come to-day. 'E may find Madame Wolsky a mascot." She was very red and looked disturbed.

"I 'ave asked them to telephone for an open carriage," Madame Wachner added, in a better-humoured tone. "It will be here in three or four minutes. Shall we drive you first to the Casino?" This question she asked of her husband.

"No," said Monsieur Wachner, harshly, "certainly not! I will walk in any case."

"And I will walk too," said Anna, who had just come up. "There is no need at all for us to take you out of your way. You had better drive at once into the open country, Sylvia."

And so they all started, Madame Wolsky and her tall, gaunt, morose companion, walking, while Sylvia and Madame Wachner drove off in the opposite direction.

The country immediately round Lacville is not pretty; the little open carriage was rather creaky, and the horse was old and tired, and yet Sylvia Bailey enjoyed her drive very much.

Madame Wachner, common-looking, plain, almost grotesque in appearance though she was, possessed that rare human attribute, vitality.

Sometimes she spoke in French, sometimes in English, changing from the one to the other with perfect ease; and honestly pleased at having escaped a long, dull, hot afternoon in the Casino, the older woman set herself to please and amuse Sylvia. She thoroughly succeeded. A clever gossip, she seemed to know a great deal about all sorts of interesting people, and she gave Sylvia an amusing account of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, whose splendid château they saw from their little carriage.

Madame Wachner also showed the most sympathetic interest in Sylvia and Sylvia's past life. Soon the Englishwoman found herself telling her new acquaintance a great deal about her childhood and girlhood—something even of her brief, not unhappy, married life. But she shrank back, both mentally and physically, when Madame Wachner carelessly observed, "Ah, but soon you will marry again; no doubt you are already engaged?"

"Oh, no!" Sylvia shook her head.

"But you are young and beautiful. It would be a crime for you not to get married again!" Madame Wachner persisted; and then, "I love beauty," she cried enthusiastically. "You did not see me, Madame, last week, but I saw you, and I said to my 'usband, 'There is a very beautiful person come to Lacville, Fritz!' 'E laughed at me. 'Now you will be satisfied—now you will 'ave something to look at,' 'e says. And it is quite true! When I come back that night I was very sorry to see you not there. But we will meet often now," she concluded pleasantly, "for I suppose, Madame, that you too intend to play?"

That was the second time she had asked the question.

"I shall play a little," said Sylvia, blushing, "but of course I do not want to get into the habit of gambling."

"No, indeed, that would be terrible! And then there are not many who can afford to gamble and to lose their good money." She looked inquiringly at Sylvia. "But, there," she sighed—her fat face became very grave—"it is extraordinary 'ow some people manage to get money—I mean those 'oo are determined to play!"

And then, changing the subject, Madame Wachner suddenly began to tell her new acquaintance all about the tragic death by drowning of her and her husband's friend at Aix-les-Bains the year before. She now spoke in French, but with a peculiar guttural accent.

"I never talk of it before Fritz," she said quickly, "but, of course, we both often think of it still. Oh, it was a terrible thing! We were devoted to this young Russian friend of ours. He and Fritz worked an excellent system together—the best Fritz ever invented—and for a little while they made money. But his terribly sad death broke our luck"—she shook her head ominously.

"How did it happen?" said Sylvia sympathetically.

And then Madame Wachner once again broke into her h-less English.

"They went together in a boat on Lake Bourget—it is a real lake, that lake, not like the little fishpond 'ere. A storm came on, and the boat upset. Fritz did his best to save the unfortunate one, but 'e could not swim. You can imagine my sensations? I was in a summer-'ouse, trembling with fright. Thunder, lightning, rain, storm, all round! Suddenly I see Fritz, pale as death, wet through, totter up the path from the lake. 'Where is Sasha?' I shriek out to 'im. And 'e shake 'is 'ead despairingly—Sasha was in the lake!"

The speaker stared before her with a look of vivid terror on her face. It was almost as if she saw the scene she was describing—nay, as if she saw the pale, dead face of the drowned man. It gave her companion a cold feeling of fear.

"And was it long before they found him?" asked Sylvia in a low tone.

"They never did find 'im," said Madame Wachner, her voice sinking to a whisper. "That was the extraordinary thing—Sasha's body was never found! Many people thought the money 'e 'ad on 'is person weighed 'im down, kept 'im entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the lake. Did not your friend tell you it made talk?"

"Yes," said Sylvia.

"'E 'ad not much money on 'is person," repeated Madame Wachner, "but still there was a good deal more than was found in 'is bed-room. That, of course, was 'anded over to the authorities. They insisted on keeping it."

"But I suppose his family got it in the end?" said Sylvia.

"No. 'E 'ad no family. You see, our friend was a Russian nobleman, but he had also been a Nihilist, so 'e 'ad concealed 'is identity. It was fortunate for us that we 'ad got to know an important person in the police; but for that we might 'ave 'ad much worry"—she shook her head. "They were so much annoyed that poor Sasha 'ad no passport. But, as I said to them—for Fritz quite lost 'is 'ead, and could say nothing—not 'alf, no, not a quarter of the strangers in Aix 'as passports, though, of course, it is a good and useful thing to 'ave one. I suppose, Madame, that you 'ave a passport?"

She stopped short, and looked at Sylvia with that eager, inquiring look which demands an answer even to the most unimportant question.

"A passport?" repeated Sylvia Bailey, surprised. "No, indeed! I've never even seen one. Why should I have a passport?"

"When you are abroad it is always a good thing to 'ave a passport," said Madame Wachner quickly. "You see, it enables you to be identified. It gives your address at 'ome. But I do not think that you can get one now—no, it is a thing that one must get in one's own country, or, at any rate," she corrected herself, "in a country where you 'ave resided a long time."

"What is your country, Madame?" asked Sylvia. "Are you French? I suppose Monsieur Wachner is German?"

Madame Wachner shook her head.

"Oh, 'e would be cross to 'ear that! No, no, Fritz is Viennese—a gay Viennese! As for me, I am"—she waited a moment—"well, Madame, I am what the French call 'une vraie cosmopolite'—oh, yes, I am a true citizeness of the world."

CHAPTER VIII

They had been driving a considerable time, and at last the coachman, turning round on his seat, asked where they wished to go next.

"I ask you to come and 'ave tea with me," said Madame Wachner turning to Sylvia. "We are not very far from the Châlet des Muguets, and I 'ave some excellent tea there. We will 'ave a rest, and tell the man to come back for us in one hour. What do you think of that, Madame?"

"It is very kind of you," said Sylvia gratefully; and, indeed, she did think it very kind. It would be pleasant to rest a while in the Wachner's villa and have tea there.

Sylvia was in the mood to enjoy every new experience, however trifling, and she had never been in a French private house.

"Au Châlet des Muguets," called out Madame Wachner to the driver.

He nodded and turned his horse round.

Soon they were making their way along newly-made roads, cut through what had evidently been, not so very long before, a great stretch of forest land.

"The good people of Lacville are in a hurry to make money," observed Madame Wachner in French. "I am told that land here has nearly trebled in value the last few years, though houses are still cheap."

"It seems a pity they should destroy such beautiful woods," said Sylvia regretfully, remembering what the Comte de Virieu had said only that morning.

The other shrugged her shoulders, "I do not care for scenery—no, not at all!" she exclaimed complacently.

The carriage drew up with a jerk before a small white gate set in low, rough, wood palings. Behind the palings lay a large, straggling, and untidy garden, relieved from absolute ugliness by some high forest trees which had been allowed to remain when the house in the centre of the plot of ground was built.

Madame Wachner stepped heavily out of the carriage, and Sylvia followed her, feeling amused and interested. She wondered very much what the inside of the funny little villa she saw before her would be like. In any case, the outside of the Châlet des Muguets was almost ludicrously unlike the English houses to which she was accustomed.

Very strange, quaint, and fantastic looked the one-storey building, standing far higher than any bungalow Sylvia had ever seen, in a lawn of high, rank grass.

The walls of the Châlet des Muguets were painted bright pink, picked out with sham brown beams, which in their turn were broken at intervals by large blue china lozenges, on which were painted the giant branches of lilies-of-the-valley which gave the villa its inappropriate name!

The chocolate-coloured row of shutters were now closed to shut out the heat, for the sun beat down pitilessly on the little house, and the whole place had a curiously deserted, unlived-in appearance.

Sylvia secretly wondered how the Wachners could bear to leave the garden, which might have been made so pretty with a little care, in such a state of neglect and untidiness. Even the path leading up to the side of the house, where jutted out a mean-looking door, was covered with weeds.

But Madame Wachner was evidently very pleased with her temporary home, and quite satisfied with its surroundings.

"It is a pretty 'ouse, is it not?" she asked in English, and smiling broadly. "And only one thousand francs, furnished, for the 'ole season!"

Sylvia quickly made a mental calculation. Forty pounds? Yes, she supposed that was very cheap—for Lacville.

"We come in May, and we may stay till October," said Madame Wachner, still speaking in a satisfied tone. "I made a bargain with a woman from the town. She comes each morning, cooks what I want, and does the 'ousework. Often we 'ave our déjeuner out and dine at 'ome, or we dine close to the Casino—just as we choose. Food is so dear in France, it makes little difference whether we stay at 'ome or not for meals."

They were now close to the chocolate-coloured door of the Châlet, and Madame Wachner, to Sylvia Bailey's surprise and amusement, lifted a corner of the shabby outside mat, and took from under it a key. With it she opened the door. "Walk in," she said familiarly, "and welcome, Madame, to my 'ome!"

Sylvia found herself in a bare little hall, so bare indeed that there was not even a hat and umbrella stand there.

Her hostess walked past her and opened a door which gave into a darkened room.

"This is our dining-room," she said proudly. "Walk in, Madame. It is 'ere we had better 'ave tea, perhaps."

Sylvia followed her. How dark, and how very hot it was in here! She could see absolutely nothing for some moments, for she was blinded by the sudden change from the bright light of the hall to the dim twilight of the closely-shuttered room.

Then gradually she began to see everything—or rather the little there was to be seen—and she felt surprised, and a little disappointed.

The dining-room was more than plainly furnished; it was positively ugly.

The furniture consisted of a round table standing on an unpolished parquet floor, of six cane chairs set against the wall, and of a walnut-wood buffet, on the shelves of which stood no plates, or ornaments of any description. The walls were distempered a reddish-pink colour, and here and there the colour had run in streaky patches.

"Is it not charming?" exclaimed Madame Wachner. "And now I will show you our pretty little salon!"

Sylvia followed her out into the hall, and so to the left into the short passage which ran down the centre of the tiny house.

The drawing-room of the Châlet des Muguets was a little larger than the dining-room, but it was equally bare of anything pretty or even convenient. There was a small sofa, covered with cheap tapestry, and four uncomfortable-looking chairs to match; on the sham marble mantelpiece stood a gilt and glass clock and two chandeliers. There was not a book, not a paper, not a flower.

Both rooms gave Sylvia a strange impression that they were very little lived in. But then, of course, the Wachners were very little at home.

"And now I will get tea," said Madame Wachner triumphantly.

"Will you not let me help you?" asked Sylvia, timidly. "I love making tea—every Englishwoman loves making tea." She had no wish to be left in this dull, ugly little drawing-room by herself.

"Oh, but your pretty dress! Would it not get 'urt in the kitchen?" cried Madame Wachner deprecatingly.

But she allowed Sylvia to follow her into the bright, clean little kitchen, of which the door was just opposite the drawing-room.

"What a charming little cuisine!" cried Sylvia smiling. She was glad to find something that she could honestly praise, and the kitchen was, in truth, the pleasantest place in the house, exquisitely neat, with the brass batterie de cuisine shining and bright. "Your day servant must be an exceptionally clean woman."

"Yes," said Madame Wachner, in a rather dissatisfied tone, "she is well enough. But, oh, those French people, how eager they are for money! Do you suppose that woman ever stays one minute beyond her time? No, indeed!"

Even as she spoke she was pouring water into a little kettle, and lighting a spirit lamp. Then, going to a cupboard, she took out two cups and a cracked china teapot.

Sylvia did her part by cutting some bread and butter, and, as she stood at the white table opposite the kitchen window, she saw that beyond the small piece of garden which lay at the back of the house was a dense chestnut wood, only separated from the Châlet des Muguets by a straggling hedge.

"Does the wood belong to you, too?" she asked.

Madame Wachner shook her head.

"Oh! no," she said, "that is for sale!"

"You must find it very lonely here at night," said Sylvia, musingly, "you do not seem to have any neighbours either to the right or left."

"There is a villa a little way down the road," said Madame Wachner quickly. "But we are not nervous people—and then we 'ave nothing it would be worth anybody's while to steal."

Sylvia reminded herself that the Wachners must surely have a good deal of money in the house if they gambled as much as Anna Wolsky said they did. Her hostess could not keep it all in the little bag which she always carried hung on her wrist.

And then, as if Madame Wachner had seen straight into her mind, the old woman said significantly. "As to our money, I will show you where we keep it. Come into my bed-room; perhaps you will take off your hat there; then we shall be what English people call 'cosy.'"

Madame Wachner led the way again into the short passage, and so into a large bed-room, which looked, like the kitchen, on to the back garden.

After the kitchen, this bed-room struck Sylvia as being the pleasantest room in the Châlet des Muguets, and that although, like the dining-room and drawing-room, it was extraordinarily bare.

There was no chest of drawers, no dressing-table, no cupboard to be seen. Madame Wachner's clothes hung on pegs behind the door, and there was a large brass-bound trunk in a corner of the room.

But the broad, low bed looked very comfortable, and there was a bath-room next door.

Madame Wachner showed her guest the bath-room with great pride.

"This is the 'English comfortable,'" she said, using the quaint phrase the French have invented to express the acme of domestic luxury. "My 'usband will never allow me to take a 'ouse that has no bath-room. 'E is very clean about 'imself"—she spoke as if it was a fact to be proud of, and Sylvia could not help smiling.

"I suppose there are still many French houses without a bath-room," she said.

"Yes," said Madame Wachner quickly, "the French are not a clean people,"—she shook her head scornfully.

"I suppose you keep your money in that box?" said Sylvia, looking at the brass-bound trunk.

"No, indeed! This is where I keep it!"

Madame Wachner suddenly lifted her thin alpaca skirt, and Sylvia, with astonishment, saw that hung round her capacious waist were a number of little wash-leather bags. "My money is all 'ere!" exclaimed Madame Wachner, laughing heartily. "It rests—oh, so cosily—against my petticoat."

They went back into the kitchen. The water was boiling, and Sylvia made the tea, Madame Wachner looking on with eager interest.

"La! La! it will be strong! I only put a pinch for ourselves. And now go into the dining-room, and I will bring the teapot there to you, Madame!"

"No, no," said Sylvia laughing, "why should we not drink our tea here, in this pretty kitchen?"

The other looked at her doubtfully. "Shall we?"

"Yes, of course!" cried Sylvia.

They drew up two rush-bottomed chairs to the table and sat down.

Sylvia thoroughly enjoyed this first taste of Madame Wachner's hospitality. The drive and the great heat had made her feel tired and languid, and the tea did her good.

"I will go and see if the carriage is there," said Madame Wachner at last.

While her hostess was away, Sylvia looked round her with some curiosity.

What an extraordinary mode of life these people had chosen for themselves! If the Wachners were rich enough to gamble, surely they had enough money to live more comfortably than they were now doing? It was clear that they hardly used the dining-room and drawing-room of the little villa at all. When Sylvia had been looking for the butter, she had not been able to help seeing that in the tiny larder there was only a small piece of cheese, a little cold meat, and a couple of eggs on a plate. No wonder Monsieur Wachner had heartily enjoyed the copious, if rather roughly-prepared, meal at the Pension Malfait.

"Yes, the carriage is there," said Madame Wachner bustling back. "And now we must be quick, or L'Ami Fritz will be cross! Do you know that absurd man actually still thinks 'e is master, and yet we 'ave been married—oh, I do not know 'ow many years! But he always loves seeing me even after we 'ave been separated but two hours or so!"

Together they went out, Madame Wachner carefully locking the door and hiding the key where she had found it, under the mat outside.

Sylvia could not help laughing.

"I really wonder you do that," she observed. "Just think how easy it would be for anyone to get into the house!"

"Yes, that is true, but there is nothing to steal. As I tell you, we always carry our money about with us," said Madame Wachner. She added in a serious tone, "and I should advise you to do so too, my dear young friend."

CHAPTER IX

A quarter of an hour's sharp driving brought Sylvia and Madame Wachner to the door of the Casino. They found Madame Wolsky in the hall waiting for them.

"I couldn't think what had happened to you!" she exclaimed in an anxious tone. "But here is your membership card, Sylvia. Now you are free of the Baccarat tables!"

Monsieur Wachner met his wife with a frowning face. He might be pleased to see Madame Wachner, but he showed his pleasure in an odd manner. Soon, however, the secret of his angry look was revealed, for Madame Wachner opened the leather bag hanging from her wrist and took out of it a hundred francs.

"Here, Fritz," she cried, gaily. "You can now begin your play!"

Sylvia Bailey felt very much amused. So poor "Ami Fritz" was not allowed to gamble unless his wife were there to see that he did not go too far. No wonder he had looked impatient and eager, as well as cross! He had been engaged—that was clear—in putting down the turns of the game, and in working out what were no doubt abstruse calculations connected with his system.

The Club was very full, and it was a little difficult at that hour of the late afternoon to get near enough to a table to play comfortably; but a stranger had kindly kept Anna Wolsky's place for her.

"I have been quite lucky," she whispered to Sylvia. "I have made three hundred francs, and now I think I will rest a bit! Slip in here, dear, and I will stand behind you. I do not advise you to risk more than twenty francs the first time; on the other hand, if you feel en veine, if the luck seems persistent—it sometimes is when one first plays with gold—then be bold, and do not hesitate!"

Sylvia, feeling rather bewildered, slipped into her friend's place, and Anna kept close behind her.

With a hand that trembled a little, she put a twenty-franc piece down on the green table. After doing so she looked up, and saw that the Comte de Virieu was standing nearly opposite to her, on the other side of the table.

His eyes were fixed on her, and there was a very kind and indulgent, if sad, smile on his face. As their glances met he leant forward and also put a twenty-franc piece on the green cloth close to where Sylvia's money lay.

The traditional words rang out: "Faites vos jeux, Messieurs, Mesdames! Le jeu est fait! Rien ne va plus!"

And then Sylvia saw her stake and that of the Count doubled. There were now four gold pieces where two had been.

"Leave your money on, and see what happens," whispered Anna. "After all you are only risking twenty francs!"

And Sylvia obediently followed the advice.

Again there came a little pause; once more the words which she had not yet learnt to understand rang out in the croupier's monotonous voice.

She looked round her; there was anxiety and watchful suspense on all the eager faces. The Comte de Virieu alone looked indifferent.

A moment later four gold pieces were added to the four already there.

"You had better take up your winnings, or someone may claim them," muttered Anna anxiously.

"Oh, but I don't like to do that," said Sylvia.

"Of course you must!"

She put out her hand and took up her four gold pieces, leaving those of the Count on the table. Then suddenly she put back the eighty francs on the cloth, and smiled up at him; it was a gay little shame-faced smile. "Please don't be cross with me, kind friend,"—that is what Sylvia's smile seemed to say to Paul de Virieu—"but this is so very exciting!"

He felt stirred to the heart. How sweet, how confidingly simple she looked! And—and how very beautiful. He at once loved and hated to see her there, his new little "amie Anglaise!"

"Are you going to leave the whole of it on this time?" whispered Anna.

"Yes, I think I will. It's rather fun. After all, I'm only risking twenty francs!" whispered back Sylvia.

And once more she won.

"What a pity you didn't start playing with a hundred francs! Think of how rich you would be now," said Anna, with the true gambler's instinct. "But it is clear, child, that you are going to do well this evening, and I shall follow your luck! Take the money off now, however."

Sylvia waited to see what the Count would do. Their eyes asked and answered the same question. He gave an imperceptible nod, and she took up her winnings—eight gold pieces!

It was well that she had done so, for the next deal of the cards favoured the banker.

Then something very surprising happened to Sylvia.

Someone—she thought it was Monsieur Wachner—addressed the croupier whose duty it was to deal out the cards, and said imperiously, "A Madame la main!"

Hardly knowing what she was doing, Sylvia took up the cards which had been pushed towards her. A murmur of satisfaction ran round the table, for there lay what even she had learnt by now was the winning number, a nine of hearts, and the second card was the king of clubs.

Again and again, she turned up winning numbers—the eight and the ace, the five and the four, the six and the three—every combination which brought luck to the table and confusion to the banker.

Eyes full of adoring admiration, aye and gratitude, were turned on the young Englishwoman. Paul de Virieu alone did not look at her. But he followed her play.

"Now put on a hundred francs," said Anna, authoritatively.

Sylvia looked at her, rather surprised by the advice, but she obeyed it. And still the Comte de Virieu followed her lead.

That made her feel dreadfully nervous and excited—it would be so terrible to make him lose too!

Neither of them lost. On the contrary, ten napoleons were added to the double pile of gold.

And then, after that, it seemed as if the whole table were following Sylvia's game.

"That pretty Englishwoman is playing for the first time!"—so the word went round. And they all began backing her luck with feverish haste.

The banker, a good-looking young Frenchman, stared at Sylvia ruefully. Thanks to her, he was being badly punished. Fortunately, he could afford it.

At the end of half an hour, feeling tired and bewildered by her good fortune, Mrs. Bailey got up and moved away from the table, the possessor of £92. The Comte Virieu had won exactly the same amount.

Now everybody looked pleased except the banker. For the first time a smile irradiated Monsieur Wachner's long face.

As for Madame Wachner, she was overjoyed. Catching Sylvia by the hand, she exclaimed, in her curious, woolly French, "I would like to embrace you! But I know that English ladies do not like kissing in public. It is splendid—splendid! Look at all the people you have made happy."

"But how about the poor banker?" asked Sylvia, blushing.

"Oh, 'e is all right. 'E is very rich."

Madame Wolsky, like the Count, had exactly followed her friend's play, but not as soon as he had done. Still, she also had made over £80.

"Two thousand francs!" she cried, joyfully. "That is very good for a beginning. And you?" she turned to Monsieur Wachner.

He hesitated, and looked at his wife deprecatingly.

"L'Ami Fritz," said Madame Wachner, "will play 'is system, Mesdames. However, I am glad to say that to-day he soon gave it up in honour of our friend here. What 'ave you made?" she asked him.

"Only eight hundred francs," he said, his face clouding over. "If you had given me more than that hundred francs, Sophie, I might have made five thousand in the time."

"Bah!" she said. "That does not matter. We must not risk more than a hundred francs a day—you know how often I've told you that, Fritz." She was now speaking in French, very quickly and angrily.

But Sylvia hardly heard. She could not help wondering why the Count had not come up and congratulated her. The thought that she had brought him luck was very pleasant to her.

He had left off playing, and was standing back, near one of the windows. He had not even glanced across to the place where she stood. This aloofness gave Sylvia a curious little feeling of discomfiture. Why, several strangers had come up and cordially thanked her for bringing them such luck.

"Let us come out of this place and 'ave some ices," exclaimed Madame Wachner, suddenly. "When l'Ami Fritz 'as a stroke of luck 'e often treats 'is old wife to an ice."

The four went out of the Casino and across the way to an hotel, which, as Madame Wachner explained to her two new friends, contained the best restaurant in Lacville. The sun was sinking, and, though it was still very hot, there was a pleasant breeze coming up from the lake.

Sylvia felt excited and happy. How wonderful—how marvellous—to make nearly £100 out of a twenty-franc piece! That was what she had done this afternoon.

And then, rather to her surprise, after they had all enjoyed ices and cakes at Madame Wachner's expense, Anna Wolsky and l'Ami Fritz declared they were going back to the Casino.

"I don't mean to play again to-night," said Sylvia, firmly. "I feel dreadfully tired," and the excitement had indeed worn her out. She longed to go back to the Hôtel du Lac.

Still, she accompanied the others to the Club, and together with Madame Wachner, she sat down some way from the tables. In a very few minutes they were joined by the other two, who had by now lost quite enough gold pieces to make them both feel angry with themselves, and, what was indeed unfair, with poor Sylvia.

"I'm sure that if you had played again, and if we had followed your play, we should have added to our winnings instead of losing, as we have done," said Anna crossly.

"I'm so sorry," and Sylvia felt really distressed. Anna had never spoken crossly to her before.

"Forgive me!" cried the Polish woman, suddenly softening. "I ought not to have said that to you, dear little friend. No doubt we should all have lost just the same. You know that fortune-teller told me that I should make plenty of money—well, even now I have had a splendid day!"

"Do come back with me and have dinner at the Villa du Lac," said Sylvia eagerly.

They shook hands with the Wachners, and as they walked the short distance from the Casino to the villa, Sylvia told Anna all about her visit to the Châlet des Muguets.

"They seem nice homely people," she said, "and Madame Wachner was really very kind."

"Yes, no doubt; but she is a very strict wife," answered Anna smiling. "The poor man had not one penny piece till she came in, and he got so angry and impatient waiting for her! I really felt inclined to lend him a little money; but I have made it a rule never to lend money in a Casino; it only leads to unpleasantness afterwards."

In the hall of the Villa du Lac the Comte de Virieu was standing reading a paper. He was dressed for dinner, and he bowed distantly as the two ladies came in.

"Why, there is the Comte de Virieu!" exclaimed Anna, in a low, and far from a pleased tone. "I had no idea he was staying here."

"Yes, he is staying here," said Sylvia, blushing uneasily, and quickly she led the way upstairs. It wanted a few minutes to seven.

Anna Wolsky waited till the door of Sylvia's room was shut, and then,

"I cannot help being sorry that you are staying in the same hotel as that man," she said, seriously. "Do not get to know him too well, dear Sylvia. The Count is a worthless individual; he has gambled away two fortunes. And now, instead of working, he is content to live on an allowance made to him by his sister's husband, the Duc d'Eglemont. If I were you, I should keep on very distant terms with him. He is, no doubt, always looking out for a nice rich woman to marry."

Sylvia made no answer. She felt she could not trust herself to speak; and there came over her a feeling of intense satisfaction that Anna Wolsky was not staying here with her at the Villa du Lac.

She also made up her mind that next time she entertained Anna she would do so at the restaurant of which the cooking had been so highly commended by Madame Wachner.

The fact that Madame Wolsky thought so ill of the Comte de Virieu made Sylvia feel uncomfortable all through dinner. But the Count, though he again bowed when the two friends came into the dining-room, did not come over and speak to them, as Sylvia had felt sure he would do this evening.

After dinner he disappeared, and Sylvia took Anna out into the garden. But she did not show her the potager. The old kitchen-garden already held for her associations which she did not wish to spoil or even to disturb.

Madame Wolsky, sipping M. Polperro's excellent coffee, again mentioned the Count.

"I am exceedingly surprised to see him here at Lacville," she said in a musing voice, "I should have expected him to go to a more chic place. He always plays in the winter at Monte Carlo."

Sylvia summoned up courage to protest.

"But, Anna," she exclaimed, "surely the Comte de Virieu is only doing what a great many other people do!"

Anna laughed good-humouredly.

"I see what you mean," she said. "You think it is a case of 'the pot calling the kettle black.' How excellent are your English proverbs, dear Sylvia! But no, it is quite different. Take me. I have an income, and choose to spend it in gambling. I might prefer to have a big house, or perhaps I should say a small house, for I am not a very rich woman. But no, I like play, and I am free to spend my money as I like. The Comte de Virieu is very differently situated! He is, so I've been told, a clever, cultivated man. He ought to be working—doing something for his country's good. And then he is so disagreeable! He makes no friends, no acquaintances. He always looks as if he was doing something of which he was ashamed. He never appears gay or satisfied, not even when he is winning—"

"He does not look as cross as Monsieur Wachner," said Sylvia, smiling.

"Monsieur Wachner is like me," said Anna calmly. "He probably made a fortune in business, and now he and his wife enjoy risking a little money at play. Why should they not?"

"Madame Wachner told me to-day all about their poor friend who was drowned," said Sylvia irrelevantly.

"Ah, yes, that was a sad affair! They were very foolish to become so intimate with him. Why, they actually had him staying with them at the time! You see, they had a villa close to the lake-side. And this young Russian, it appears, was very fond of boating. It was a mysterious affair, because, oddly enough, he had not been out in the town, or even to the Casino, for four days before the accident happened. There was a notion among some people that he had committed suicide, but that, I fancy, was not so. He had won a large sum of money. Some thought the gold weighed down his body in the water—. But that is absurd. It must have been the weeds."

"Madame Wachner told me that quite a lot of money was found in his room," said Sylvia quickly.

"No, that is not true. About four hundred francs were found in his bed-room. That was all. I fancy the police made themselves rather unpleasant to Monsieur Wachner. The Russian Embassy made inquiries, and it seemed so odd to the French authorities that the poor fellow could not be identified. They found no passport, no papers of any sort—"

"Have you a passport?" asked Sylvia. "Madame Wachner asked me if I had one. But I've never even seen a passport!"

"No," said Anna, "I have not got a passport now. I once had one, but I lost it. One does not require such a thing in a civilised country! But a Russian must always have a passport, it is an absolute law in Russia. And the disappearance of that young man's passport was certainly strange—in fact, the whole affair was mysterious."

"It must have been terrible for Monsieur and Madame Wachner," said Sylvia thoughtfully.

"Oh yes, very disagreeable indeed! Luckily he is entirely absorbed in his absurd systems, and she is a very cheerful woman."

"Yes, indeed she is!" Sylvia could not help smiling. "I am glad we have got to know them, Anna. It is rather mournful when one knows no one at all in a place of this kind."

And Anna agreed, indifferently.

CHAPTER X

And then there began a series of long cloudless days for Sylvia Bailey. For the first time she felt as if she was seeing life, and such seeing was very pleasant to her.

Not in her wildest dreams, during the placid days of her girlhood and brief married life, had she conceived of so interesting and so exhilarating an existence as that which she was now leading! And this was perhaps owing in a measure to the fact that there is, if one may so express it, a spice of naughtiness in life as led at Lacville.

In a mild, a very mild, way Sylvia Bailey had fallen a victim to the Goddess of Play. She soon learned to look forward to the hours she and Anna Wolsky spent each day at the baccarat tables. But, unlike Anna, Sylvia was never tempted to risk a greater sum on that dangerous green cloth than she could comfortably afford to lose, and perhaps just because this was so, on the whole she won money rather than lost it.

A certain change had come over the relations of the two women. They still met daily, if only at the Casino, and they occasionally took a walk or a drive together, but Madame Wolsky—and Sylvia Bailey felt uneasy and growing concern that it was so—now lived for play, and play alone.

Absorbed in the simple yet fateful turns of the game, Anna would remain silent for hours, immersed in calculations, and scarcely aware of what went on round her. She and Monsieur Wachner—"L'Ami Fritz," as even Sylvia had fallen into the way of calling him—seemed scarcely alive unless they were standing or sitting round a baccarat table, putting down or taking up the shining gold pieces which they treated as carelessly as if they were counters.

But it was not the easy, idle, purposeless life she was now leading that brought the pretty English widow that strange, unacknowledged feeling of entire content with life.

What made existence at Lacville so exciting and so exceptionally interesting to Sylvia Bailey was her friendship with Comte Paul de Virieu.

There is in every woman a passion for romance, and in Sylvia this passion had been baulked, not satisfied, by her first marriage.

Bill Chester loved her well and deeply, but he was her lawyer and trustee as well as her lover. He had an honest, straightforward nature, and when with her something always prompted Chester to act the part of candid friend, and the part of candid friend fits in very ill with that of lover. To take but one example of how ill his honesty of purpose served him in the matter, Sylvia had never really forgiven him the "fuss" he had made about her string of pearls.

But with the Comte de Virieu she never quite knew what to be at, and mystery is the food of romance.

At the Villa du Lac the two were almost inseparable, and yet so intelligently and quietly did the Count arrange their frequent meetings—their long walks and talks in the large deserted garden, their pleasant morning saunters through the little town—that no one, or so Sylvia believed, was aware of any special intimacy between them.

Sometimes, as they paced up and down the flower-bordered paths of the old kitchen-garden, or when, tired of walking, they made their way into the orangery and sat down on the circular stone bench by the fountain, Sylvia would remember, deep in her heart, the first time Count Paul had brought her there; and how she had been a little frightened, not perhaps altogether unpleasantly so, by his proximity!

She had feared—but she was now deeply ashamed of having entertained such a thought—that he might suddenly begin making violent love to her, that he might perhaps try to kiss her! Were not all Frenchmen of his type rather gay dogs?

But nothing—nothing of the sort had ever been within measurable distance of happening. On the contrary, he always treated her with scrupulous respect, and he never—and this sometimes piqued Sylvia—made love to her, or attempted to flirt with her. Instead, he talked to her in that intimate, that confiding fashion which a woman finds so attractive in a man when she has reason to believe his confidences are made to her alone.

When Bill Chester asked her not to do something she desired to do, Sylvia felt annoyed and impatient, but when Count Paul, as she had fallen into the way of calling him, made no secret of his wish that she should give up play, Sylvia felt touched and pleased that he should care.

Early in their acquaintance the Count had warned her against making casual friendships in the Gambling Rooms, and he even did not like her knowing—this amused Sylvia—the harmless Wachners.

When he saw her talking to Madame Wachner in the Club, Count Paul would look across the baccarat table and there would come a little frown over his eyes—a frown she alone could see.

And as the days went on, and as their intimacy seemed to grow closer and ever closer, there came across Sylvia a deep wordless wish—and she had never longed for anything so much in her life—to rescue her friend from what he admitted to be his terrible vice of gambling. In this she showed rather a feminine lack of logic, for, while wishing to wean him from his vice, she did not herself give up going to the Casino.

She would have been angry indeed had the truth been whispered to her, the truth that it was not so much her little daily gamble—as Madame Wachner called it—that made Sylvia so faithful an attendant at the Club; it was because when there she was still with Paul de Virieu, she could see and sympathise with him when he was winning, and grieve when he was losing, as alas! he often lost.

When they were not at the Casino the Comte de Virieu very seldom alluded to his play, or to the good or ill fortune which might have befallen him that day. When with her he tried, so much was clear to Sylvia, to forget his passion for gambling.

But this curious friendship of hers with Count Paul only occupied, in a material sense, a small part of Sylvia's daily life at Lacville; and the people with whom she spent most of her time were still Anna Wolsky and Monsieur and Madame Wachner, or perhaps it should be said Madame Wachner.

It was not wonderful that Mrs. Bailey liked the cheerful woman, who was so bright and jovial in manner, and who knew, too, how to flatter so cleverly. When with Madame Wachner Sylvia was made to feel that she was not only very pretty, but also immensely attractive, and just now she was very anxious to think herself both.

Late one afternoon—and they all four always met each afternoon at the Casino—Madame Wachner suddenly invited Sylvia and Anna to come back to supper at the Châlet des Muguets.

Anna was unwilling to accept the kindly invitation. It was clear that she did not wish to waste as much time away from the Casino as going to the Wachners' villa would involve. But, seeing that Sylvia was eager to go, she gave way.

Now on this particular afternoon Sylvia was feeling rather dull, and, as she expressed it to herself, "down on her luck," for the Comte de Virieu had gone into Paris for a few hours.

His sister, the Duchesse d'Eglemont, had come up from the country for a few days, and the great pleasure and delight he had expressed at the thought of seeing her had given the young English widow a little pang of pain. It made her feel how little she counted in his life after all.

And so, for the second time, Sylvia visited the odd, fantastic-looking Châlet des Muguets, and under very pleasant auspices.

This evening the bare dining-room she had thought so ugly wore an air of festivity. There were flowers on the round table and on the buffet, but, to her surprise, a piece of oilcloth now hid the parquet floor. This puzzled Sylvia, as such trifling little matters of fact often puzzle a fresh young mind. Surely the oilcloth had not been there on her last visit to the villa? She remembered clearly the unpolished parquet floor.

Thanks to the hostess and to Sylvia herself, supper was a bright, merry meal. There was a variety of cold meats, some fine fruit, and a plate of dainty pastry.

They all waited on one another, though Madame Wachner insisted on doing most of the work. But L'Ami Fritz, for once looking cheerful and eager, mixed the salad, putting in even more vinegar than oil, as Mrs. Bailey laughingly confessed that she hated olive oil!

After they had eaten their appetising little meal, the host went off into the kitchen where Sylvia had had tea on her first visit to the Châlet, and there he made the most excellent coffee for them all, and even Mrs. Bailey, who was treated as the guest of honour, though she knew that coffee was not good for her, was tempted into taking some.

One thing, however, rather dashed her pleasure in the entertainment.

Madame Wachner, forgetting for once her usual tact, suddenly made a violent attack on the Comte de Virieu.

They were all talking of the habitués of the Casino: "The only one I do not like," she exclaimed, in French, "is that Count—if indeed Count he be? He is so arrogant, so proud, so rude! We have known him for years, have L'Ami Fritz and I, for we are always running across him at Monte Carlo and other places. But no, each time we meet he looks at us as if he was a fish. He does not even nod!"

"When the Comte de Virieu is actually playing, he does not know that other people exist," said Anna Wolsky, slowly.

She had looked across at Sylvia and noticed her English friend's blush and look of embarrassment. "I used to watch him two years ago at Monte Carlo, and I have never seen a man more absorbed in his play."

"That is no excuse!" cried Madame Wachner, scornfully. "Besides, that is only half the truth. He is ashamed of the way he is spending his life, and he hates the people who see him doing it! It is shameful to be so idle. A strong young man doing nothing, living on charity, so they say! And he despises all those who do what he himself is not ashamed to do."

And Sylvia, looking across at her, said to herself with a heavy sigh that this was true. Madame Wachner had summed up Count Paul very accurately.

At last there came the sound of a carriage in the quiet lane outside.

"Fritz! Go and see if that is the carriage I ordered to come here at nine o'clock," said his wife sharply; and then, as he got up silently to obey her, she followed him out into the passage, and Sylvia, who had very quick ears, heard her say, in low, vehement tones, "I work and work and work, but you do nothing! Do try and help me—it is for your sake I am taking all this trouble!"

What could these odd words mean? At what was Madame Wachner working?

A sudden feeling of discomfort came over Sylvia. Then the stout, jolly-looking woman was not without private anxieties and cares? There had been something so weary as well as so angry in the tone in which Madame Wachner spoke to her beloved "Ami Fritz."

A moment later he was hurrying towards the gate.

"Sophie," he cried out from the garden, "the carriage is here! Come along—we have wasted too much time already—"

Like Anna Wolsky, Monsieur Wachner grudged every moment spent away from the tables.

Madame Wachner hurried her two guests into her bed-room to put on their hats.

Anna Wolsky walked over to the window.

"What a strange, lonely place to live in!" she said, and drew the lace shawl she was wearing a little more closely about her thin shoulders. "And that wood over there—I should be afraid to live so near a wood! I should think that there might be queer people concealed there."

"Bah! Why should we be frightened, even if there were queer people there!"

"Well, but sometimes you must have a good deal of money in this house."

Madame Wachner laughed.

"When we have so much money that we cannot carry it about, and that, alas! is not very often—but still, when Fritz makes a big win, we go into Paris and bank the money."

"I do not trouble to do that," said Anna, "for I always carry all my money about with me. What do you do?" she turned to Sylvia Bailey.

"I leave it in my trunk at the hotel," said Sylvia. "The servants at the Villa du Lac seem to be perfectly honest—in fact they are mostly related to the proprietor, M. Polperro."

"Oh, but that is quite wrong!" exclaimed Madame Wachner, eagerly. "You should never leave your money in the hotel; you should always carry it about with you—in little bags like this. See!"

Again she suddenly lifted the light alpaca skirt she was wearing, as she had done before, in this very room, on the occasion of Sylvia's first visit to the Châlet. "That is the way to carry money in a place like this!" she said, smiling. "But now hurry, or all our evening will be gone!"

They left the house, and hastened down the garden to the gate, where L'Ami Fritz received his wife with a grumbling complaint that they had been so long.

And he was right, for the Casino was very full. Sylvia made no attempt to play. Somehow she did not care for the Club when Count Paul was not there.

She was glad when she was at last able to leave the others for the Villa du Lac.

Anna Wolsky accompanied her friend to the entrance of the Casino. The Comte de Virieu was just coming in as Sylvia went out; bowing distantly to the two ladies, he hurried through the vestibule towards the Club.

Sylvia's heart sank. Not even after spending a day with his beloved sister could he resist the lure of play!

CHAPTER XI

During much of the night that followed Sylvia lay awake, her mind full of the Comte de Virieu, and of the strange friendship which had sprung up between them.

Their brief meeting at the door of the Casino had affected her very painfully. As he had passed her with a distant bow, a look of shame, of miserable unease, had come over Count Paul's face.

Yes, Madame Wachner had summed him up very shrewdly, if unkindly. He was ashamed, not only of the way in which he was wasting his life, but also of the company into which his indulgence of his vice of gambling brought him.

And Sylvia—it was a bitter thought—was of that company. That fact must be faced by her. True, she was not a gambler in the sense that most of the people she met and saw daily at the Casino were gamblers, but that was simply because the passion of play did not absorb her as it did them. It was her good fortune, not any virtue in herself, that set her apart from Anna Wolsky.

And now she asked herself—or rather her conscience asked her—whether she would not do well to leave Lacville; to break off this strange and—yes, this dangerous intimacy with a man of whom she knew so very little, apart from the great outstanding fact that he was a confirmed gambler, and that he had given up all that makes life worth living to such a man as he, in order to drag on a dishonoured, purposeless life at one or other of the great gambling centres of the civilised world?

And yet the thought of going away from Lacville was already intolerable to Sylvia. There had arisen between the Frenchman and herself a kind of close, wordless understanding and sympathy which she, at any rate, still called "friendship." But she would probably have assented to Meredith's words, "Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two."

At last she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt a disturbing dream.

She found herself wandering about the Châlet des Muguets, trying to find a way out of the locked and shuttered building. The ugly little rooms were empty. It was winter, and she was shivering with cold. Someone must have locked her in by mistake. She had been forgotten....

"Toc, toc, toc!" at the door. And Sylvia sat up in bed relieved of her nightmare. It was eight o'clock! She had overslept herself. Félicie was bringing in her tea, and on the tray lay a letter addressed in a handwriting Sylvia did not know, and on which was a French stamp.

She turned the pale-grey envelope over doubtfully, wondering if it was really meant for her. But yes—of that there could be no doubt, for it was addressed, "Madame Bailey, Villa du Lac, Lacville-les-Bains."

She opened it to find that the note contained a gracefully-worded invitation to déjeuner for the next day, and the signature ran—"Marie-Anne d'Eglemont."

Why, it must be Paul de Virieu's sister! How very kind of her, and—and how very kind of him.

The letter must have been actually written when Count Paul was in Paris with his sister—and yet, when they had passed one another the evening before, he had bowed as distantly, as coldly, as he might have done to the most casual of acquaintances.

Sylvia got up, filled with a tumult of excited feeling which this simple invitation to luncheon scarcely warranted.

But Paul de Virieu came in from his ride also eager, excited, smiling.

"Have you received a note from my sister?" he asked, hurrying towards her in the dining-room which they now had to themselves each morning. "When I told her how you and I had become"—he hesitated a moment, and then added the words, "good friends, she said how much she would like to meet you. I know that you and my dear Marie-Anne would like one another—"

"It is very kind of your sister to ask me to come and see her," said Sylvia, a little stiffly.

"I am going back to Paris this evening," he went on, "to stay with my sister for a couple of nights. So if you can come to-morrow to lunch, as I think my sister has asked you to do, I will meet you at the station."

After breakfast they went out into the garden, and when they were free of the house Count Paul said suddenly,

"I told Marie-Anne that you were fond of riding, and, with your permission, she proposes to send over a horse for you every morning. And, Madame—forgive me—but I told her I feared you had no riding habit! You and she, however, are much the same height, and she thinks that she might be able to lend you one if you will honour her by accepting the loan of it during the time you are at Lacville."

Sylvia was bewildered, she scarcely knew how to accept so much kindness.

"If you will write a line to my sister some time to-day," continued the Count, "I will be the bearer of your letter."

That day marked a very great advance in the friendship of Sylvia Bailey and Paul de Virieu.

Till that day, much as he had talked to her about himself and his life, and the many curious adventures he had had, for he had travelled a great deal, and was a cultivated man, he had very seldom spoken to her of his relations.

But to-day he told her a great deal about them, and she found herself taking a very keen, intimate interest in this group of French people whom she had never seen—whom, perhaps, with one exception, she never would see.

How unlike English folk they must be—these relations of Count Paul! For the matter of that, how unlike any people Sylvia had ever seen or heard of.

First, he told her of the sweet-natured, pious young duchess who was to be her hostess on the morrow—the sister whom Paul loved so dearly, and to whom he owed so much.

Then he described, in less kindly terms, her proud narrow-minded, if generous, husband, the French duke who still lived—thanks to the fact that his grandmother had been the daughter of a great Russian banker—much as must have lived the nobles in the Middle Ages—apart, that is, from everything that would remind him that there was anything in the world of which he disapproved or which he disliked.

The Duc d'Eglemont ignored the fact that France was a Republic; he still talked of "the King," and went periodically into waiting on the Duke of Orleans.

Count Paul also told Sylvia of his great-uncle and godfather, the Cardinal, who lived in Italy, and who had—or so his family liked to believe—so nearly become Pope.

Then there were his three old maiden great-aunts, who had all desired to be nuns, but who apparently had not had the courage to do so when it came to the point. They dwelt together in a remote Burgundian château, and they each spent an hour daily in their chapel praying that their dear nephew Paul might be rescued from the evils of play.

THE CHINK IN THE ARMOUR

BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

AUTHOR OF "THE END OF HER HONEYMOON," "THE LODGER," Etc.

1912

NEW YORKGROSSET & DUNLAP