The Comte de Virieu laughed.

“Far from it!  Our clever host hires out his potager to a firm of market gardeners, part of the bargain being that they allow him to have as much fruit and vegetables as he requires throughout the year.  Why, the potager of the Villa du Lac supplies the whole of Lacville with fruit and flowers!  When I was a child I thought this part of the garden paradise, and I spent here my happiest hours.”

“It must be very odd for you to come back and stay in the Villa now that it is an hotel.”

“At first it seemed very strange,” he answered gravely.  “But now I have become quite used to the feeling.”

They walked on for awhile along one of the narrow flower-bordered paths.

“Would you care to go into the orangery?” he said.  “There is not much to see there now, for all the orange-trees are out of doors.  Still, it is a quaint, pretty old building.”

The orangery of the Villa du Lac was an example of that at once artificial and graceful eighteenth-century architecture which, perhaps because of its mingled formality and delicacy, made so distinguished and attractive a setting to feminine beauty.  It remained, the only survival of the dependencies of a chateau sacked and burned in the Great Revolution, more than half a century before the Villa du Lac was built.

The high doors were wide open, and Sylvia walked in.  Though all the pot-plants and half-hardy shrubs were sunning themselves in the open-air, the orangery did not look bare, for every inch of the inside walls had been utilised for growing grapes and peaches.

There was a fountain set in the centre of the stone floor, and near the fountain was a circular seat.

“Let us sit down,” said Paul de Virieu suddenly.  But when Sylvia Bailey sat down he did not come and sit by her, instead he so placed himself that he looked across at her slender, rounded figure, and happy smiling face.

“Are you thinking of staying long at Lacville, Madame?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t know,” she answered hesitatingly.  “It will depend on my friend Madame Wolsky’s plans.  If we both like it, I daresay we shall stay three or four weeks.”

There fell what seemed to Sylvia a long silence between them.  The Frenchman was gazing at her with a puzzled, thoughtful look.

Suddenly he got up, and after taking a turn up and down the orangery, he came and stood before her.

“Mrs. Bailey!” he exclaimed.  “Will you permit me to be rather impertinent?”

Sylvia reddened violently.  The question took her utterly by surprise.  But the Comte de Virieu’s next words at once relieved, and yes, it must be admitted, chagrined her.

“I ask you, Madame, to leave Lacville!  I ask permission to tell you frankly and plainly that it is not a place to which you ought to have been brought.”

He spoke with great emphasis.