"But I cannot go away now!" cried Sylvia. She was really impressed--very uncomfortably impressed--by his earnest words. "It would be most unkind to my friend, Madame Wolsky. Surely, it is possible to stay at Lacville, and even to play a little, without anything very terrible happening?" She looked at him coaxingly, anxiously, as a child might have done. But Sylvia was not a child; she was a very lovely young woman. Comte Paul de Virieu's heart began to beat. But, bah! This was absurd! His day of love and love-making lay far, far behind him. He rose and walked towards the door. In speaking to her as he had forced himself to speak, the Frenchman had done an unselfish and kindly action. Sylvia's gentle and unsophisticated charm had touched him deeply, and so he had given her what he knew to be the best possible advice. "I am not so foolish as to pretend that the people who come and play in the Casino of Lacville are all confirmed gamblers," he said, slowly. "We French take our pleasures lightly, Madame, and no doubt there is many an excellent Parisian bourgeois who comes here and makes or loses his few francs, and gets no harm from it. But, still, I swore to myself that I would warn you of the danger--" They went out into the bright sunshine again, and Sylvia somehow felt as if she had made a friend--a real friend--in the Comte de Virieu. It was a curious sensation, and one that gave her more pleasure than she would have cared to own even to herself. Most of the men she had met since she became a widow treated her as an irresponsible being. Many of them tried to flirt with her for the mere pleasure of flirting with so pretty a woman; others, so she was resentfully aware, had only become really interested in her when they became aware that she had been left by her husband with an income of two thousand pounds a year. She had had several offers of marriage since her widowhood, but not one of the men who had come and said he loved her had confessed as much about himself as this stranger had done. She was the more touched and interested because the Frenchman's manner was extremely reserved. Even in the short time she had been at the Villa du Lac, Sylvia had realised that though the Count was on speaking terms with most of his fellow-guests, he seemed intimate with none of the people whose happy chatter had filled the dining-room the night before. Just before going back into the Villa, Sylvia stopped short; she fixed her large ingenuous eyes on the Count's face. "I want to thank you again," she said diffidently, "for your kindness in giving me this warning. You know we in England have a proverb, 'Forewarned is forearmed.' Well, believe me, I will not forget what you have said, and--and I am grateful for your confidence. Of course, I regard it as quite private." The Count looked at her for a moment in silence, and then he said very deliberately,