ime when de Florac had set the fashion, and that not
only in waistcoats and walking-sticks. He was a fine swordsman, and was
even now in some request as second at fashionable duels. None knew more
certainly than he every punctilio of those unwritten laws which govern
affairs of honour, and, had he been born to even a quarter of the
fortune of Tom Pargeter, his record would probably have remained
unstained. Unfortunately for him this had not been the case; he had soon
run through the moderate fortune left him by his father, and he had
ruined by his own folly, and his one vice of gambling, any chance that
might have remained to him of a good marriage.

Even in the Faubourg St. Germain,--loyal to its black sheep as are ever
the aristocracies of the old world,--Florac was now looked at askance;
and in the world of the boulevards strange stories were told as to the
expedients by which he now made--it could not be called earned--a
living. The playing of those games which can best be described as
requiring a minimum of judgment and a maximum of luck was apparently the
only occupation remaining to the Marquis de Florac, and when in funds he
was often to be found in the card-rooms of "Monaco Junior."

"He's losing now," whispered Pargeter. "I should think he's near the end
of his tether, eh? Funny how money goes from hand to hand! I don't
suppose Florac knows that it's _my_ money he's chucking away!"

"Your money?" repeated Vanderlyn with listless surprise, "d'you mean to
say that you've been lending Florac money?" He looked, with a pity in
which there entered a vague fellow-feeling, at the mask-like face of the
man against whom the luck seemed to be going so dead.

"I'm not quite a fool!" exclaimed Pargeter, piqued at the suggestion.
"All the same, Grid, it _is_ my money, or a little bit of it at any
rate!"

An English acquaintance of the two men came up to them. "The French are
a wonderful people," he said rather crossly, "everybody says that Florac
is ruined,--that he's living on ten francs a day allowed him by a kind
grandmother--and yet since I have been standing here he's dropped, at
least so I've calculated, not far short of four hundred pounds!"

A grin came over Pargeter's small neat face, and lit up his odd,
different-coloured eyes. "'_Cherchez la femme_,'" he observed, affecting
an atrocious English accent; and then he repeated, as if he were himself
the inventor, the patentee, of the admirable aphorism, "'_Cherc