But deep in her heart Sylvia knew well that when Bill Chester was there Paul de Virieu would draw back; only when they were really alone together did he talk eagerly, naturally.

In the dining-room of the Villa he hardly ever spoke to her, and when they were both in the Baccarat-room of the Club he seldom came and stood by her side, though when she looked up she often found his eyes fixed on her with that ardent, absorbed gaze which made her heart beat, and her cheeks flush with mingled joy and pain.

Suddenly, as if her thoughts had brought him there, she saw Count Paul’s straight, slim figure turn in from the road through the gates of the Villa.

He glanced up at her window and took off his hat.  He looked cool, unruffled, and self-possessed, but her eager eyes saw a change in his face.  He looked very grave, and yet oddly happy.  Was it possible that he had news at last of Anna Wolsky?

He mounted the stone-steps and disappeared into the house; and Sylvia, getting up, began moving restlessly about her room.  She longed to go downstairs, and yet a feminine feeling of delicacy restrained her from doing so.

A great stillness brooded over everything.  The heat had sent everyone indoors.  M. Polperro, perhaps because of his Southern up-bringing, always took an early afternoon siesta.  It looked as if his servants followed his example.  The Villa du Lac seemed asleep.

Sylvia went across to the other window, the window overlooking the large, shady garden, and there, glancing down, she saw Count Paul.

“Come into the garden—­,” he said softly in English; and Sylvia, leaning over the bar of her window, thought he added the word “Maud”—­but of course that could not have been so, for her name, as the Count knew well, was Sylvia!  And equally of course he always addressed her as “Madame.”

“It’s so nice and cool up here,” she whispered back.  “I don’t believe it is half so cool in the garden!”

She gazed down into his upturned face with innocent coquetry, pretending—­only pretending—­to hesitate as to what she would do in answer to his invitation.

But Sylvia Bailey was but an amateur at the Great Game, the game at which only two—­only a man and a woman—­can play, and yet which is capable of such infinite, such bewilderingly protean variations.  So her next move, one which Paul de Virieu, smiling behind his moustache, foresaw—­was to turn away from the window.

She ran down the broad shallow staircase very quickly, for it had occurred to her that the Count, taking her at her word, might leave the garden, and, sauntering off to the Casino, lose his money—­for whatever he might be in love, Count Paul was exceedingly unlucky at cards!  And lately she had begun to think that she was gradually weaning her friend from what she knew to be in his case, whatever it was in hers, and in that of many of the people about them, the terrible vice of gambling.