Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/133

Rh 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