His keen face softened as he thought of Blanche Farrow.  Poor, proud, well-bred and pleasant, poor only in a relative sense, for she was the only unmarried daughter of an Irish peer whose title had passed away to a distant cousin.  Miss Farrow could have lived in comfort and in dignity on what income she had, but for one inexplicable failing—­the more old-fashioned and severe of her friends and relatives called it a vice.

Soon after she had come into the enjoyment of her few hundreds a year, some rich, idle acquaintance had taken Blanche to Monte Carlo, and there, like a duck to water, she had taken to play!  Henceforth gambling—­any kind of gambling—­had become her absorbing interest in life.  It was well indeed that what fortune she had was strictly settled on her sisters’ children, her two brothers-in-law being her trustees.  With one of them, who was really wealthy, she had long ago quarrelled.  With the other, now a widower, with only a life interest in his estate, she was on coldly cordial terms, and sometimes, as was the case now, acted as chaperon to his only child, her niece and namesake, Bubbles Dunster.

Blanche Farrow never begged or borrowed.  When more hard hit than usual, she retired, alone with her faithful maid, to some cheap corner of the Continent; and as she kept her money worries to herself, she was well liked and popular with a considerable circle.

Such was the human being who in a sense was Lionel Varick’s only close friend.  They had met in a strange way, some ten years ago, in what Miss Farrow’s sterner brother-in-law had called a gambling hell.  And, just as we know that sometimes Satan will be found rebuking sin, so Blanche Farrow had set herself to stop the then young Lionel Varick on the brink.  He had been in love with her at that time, and on the most unpleasant evening when a cosy flat in Jermyn Street had been raided by the police, he had given Blanche Farrow his word that he would never play again; and he had kept his word.  He alone knew how grateful he had cause to be to the woman who had saved him from joining the doomed throng who only live for play.

And now there was still to their friendship just that delightful little touch of sentiment which adds salt and savour to almost every relation between a man and a woman.  Though Blanche was some years older than Lionel, she looked, if anything, younger than he did, for she had the slim, upright figure, the pretty soft brown hair, and the delicate, finely modelled features which keep so many an Englishwoman of her type and class young—­young, if not in years, yet young in everything else that counts.  Even what she sometimes playfully called her petit vice had not made her haggard or worn, and she had never lost interest in becoming, well-made clothes.