" And then she added, a little
shyly, "Won't you sit down?"
Again the Comte de Virieu bowed low before her, and then he sat down.
"I fear you will not be allowed to go into the Club this time unless you
become a member. They have to be very strict in these matters; to allow a
stranger in the Club at all is a legal infraction. The Casino authorities
might be fined for doing so."
"How well you speak English!" exclaimed Sylvia, abruptly and
irrelevantly.
"I was at school in England," he said, simply, "at a Catholic College
called Beaumont, near Windsor; but now I do not go there as often as
I should like to do."
And then, scarcely knowing how it came about, Sylvia fell into easy,
desultory, almost intimate talk with this entire stranger. But there was
something very agreeable in his simple serious manners.
After a while Sylvia suddenly remembered that the Count had thrown his
cigarette away before speaking to her.
"Won't you smoke?" she said.
"Are you sure you don't mind, Madame?"
"No, of course I don't mind!" and she was just going to add that her
husband had been a great smoker, when some feeling she could not have
analysed to herself made her alter her words to "My father smoked all day
long--"
The Count got up and went off towards the house.
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