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 Hotel 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 Hotel 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.