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 Chalet 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.  Felicie 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 dejeuner 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.