Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/139

 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 129