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 tyrant he will so soon become.
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