He told himself that Sylvia Bailey could not be left alone in a place like Lacville, and that it was his positive duty to stay on there and look after her....

Suddenly their eyes met.  Sylvia blushed—­Heavens! how adorable she looked when there came that vivid rose-red blush over her rounded cheeks.  And she was adorable in a simple, unsophisticated way, which appealed to Paul de Virieu as nothing in woman had ever appealed to him before.

He could not help enjoying the thought of how surprised his sister would be.  Marie-Anne had doubtless pictured Mrs. Bailey as belonging to the rather hard, self-assertive type of young Englishwoman of whom Paris sees a great deal.  But Sylvia looked girlishly simple, timid, and confiding.

As he greeted her, Paul de Virieu’s manner was serious, almost solemn.  But none the less, while they walked side by side in a quiet, leisurely fashion through the great grey station, Sylvia felt as if she had indeed passed through the shining portals of fairyland.

In the covered courtyard stood the Duchesse’s carriage.  Count Paul motioned the footman aside and stood bareheaded while Sylvia took her place in the victoria.  As he sat down by her side he suddenly observed, “My brother-in-law does not like motor-cars,” and Sylvia felt secret, shame-faced gratitude to the Duc d’Eglemont, for, thanks to this prejudice of his, the moments now being spent by her alone with Count Paul were trebled.

As the carriage drove with swift, gondola-like motion through the hot streets, Sylvia felt more than ever as if she were in a new, enchanted country—­that dear country called Romance, and, as if to prolong the illusion, the Count began to talk what seemed to her the language of that country.

“Every Frenchman,” he exclaimed, abruptly, “is in love with love, and when you hear—­as you may do sometimes, Madame—­that a Frenchman is rarely in love with his own wife, pray answer that this is quite untrue!  For it often happens that in his wife a Frenchman discovers the love he has sought elsewhere in vain.”

He looked straight before him as he added:  “As for marriage—­well, marriage is in my country regarded as a very serious matter indeed!  No Frenchman goes into marriage as light-heartedly as does the average Englishman, and as have done, for instance, so many of my own English schoolfellows.  No, to a Frenchman his marriage means everything or nothing, and if he loved a woman it would appear to him a dastardly action to ask her to share his life if he did not believe that life to be what would be likely to satisfy her, to bring her honour and happiness.”

Sylvia turned to him, and, rather marvelling at her own temerity, she asked a fateful question: 

“But would love ever make the kind of Frenchman you describe give up a way of life that was likely to make his wife unhappy?”

Count Paul looked straight into the blue eyes which told him so much more than their owner knew they told.