her about himself and his life,
and the many curious adventures he had had, for he had travelled a great
deal, and was a cultivated man, he had very seldom spoken to her of his
relations.

But to-day he told her a great deal about them, and she found herself
taking a very keen, intimate interest in this group of French people whom
she had never seen--whom, perhaps, with one exception, she never would
see.

How unlike English folk they must be--these relations of Count Paul! For
the matter of that, how unlike any people Sylvia had ever seen or heard
of.

First, he told her of the sweet-natured, pious young duchess who was to
be her hostess on the morrow--the sister whom Paul loved so dearly, and
to whom he owed so much.

Then he described, in less kindly terms, her proud narrow-minded, if
generous, husband, the French duke who still lived--thanks to the
fact that his grandmother had been the daughter of a great Russian
banker--much as must have lived the nobles in the Middle Ages--apart,
that is, from everything that would remind him that there was anything
in the world of which he disapproved or which he disliked.

The Duc d'Eglemont ignored the fact that France was a Republic; he still
talked of "the King," and went periodically into waiting on the Duke of
Orleans.

Count Paul also told Sylvia of his great-uncle and godfather, the
Cardinal, who lived in Italy, and who had--or so his family liked to
believe--so nearly become Pope.

Then there were his three old maiden great-aunts, who had all desired to
be nuns, but who apparently had not had the courage to do so when it came
to the point. They dwelt together in a remote Burgundian chateau, and
they each spent an hour daily in their chapel praying that their dear
nephew Paul might be rescued from the evils of play.

And as Paul de Virieu told Sylvia Bailey of all these curious old-world
folk of his, Sylvia wondered more and more why he led the kind of
existence he was leading now.

* * * * *

For the first time since Sylvia had come to Lacville, neither she nor
Count Paul spent any part of that afternoon at the Casino. They were both
at that happy stage of--shall we say friendship?--when a man and a woman
cannot see too much of one another; when time is as if it were not; when
nothing said or done can be wrong in the other's sight; when Love is
still a soft and an invisible presence, with naught about him of the
exacting tyr