close
friend. They had met in a strange way, some ten years ago, in what Miss
Farrow's sterner brother-in-law had called a gambling hell. And, just as
we know that sometimes Satan will be found rebuking sin, so Blanche
Farrow had set herself to stop the then young Lionel Varick on the
brink. He had been in love with her at that time, and on the most
unpleasant evening when a cosy flat in Jermyn Street had been raided by
the police, he had given Blanche Farrow his word that he would never
play again; and he had kept his word. He alone knew how grateful he had
cause to be to the woman who had saved him from joining the doomed
throng who only live for play.

And now there was still to their friendship just that delightful little
touch of sentiment which adds salt and savour to almost every relation
between a man and a woman. Though Blanche was some years older than
Lionel, she looked, if anything, younger than he did, for she had the
slim, upright figure, the pretty soft brown hair, and the delicate,
finely modelled features which keep so many an Englishwoman of her type
and class young--young, if not in years, yet young in everything else
that counts. Even what she sometimes playfully called her _petit vice_
had not made her haggard or worn, and she had never lost interest in
becoming, well-made clothes.

Blanche Farrow thought she knew everything there was to know about
Lionel Varick, and, as a matter of fact, she did know a great deal no
one else knew, though not quite as much as she believed. She knew him to
be a hedonist, a materialist, a man who had very few scruples. But not
even to herself would she have allowed him to be called by the ugly name
of adventurer. Perhaps it would be truer to say--for she was a very
clever woman--that even if, deep in her heart, she must have admitted
that such a name would have once suited him, she could now gladly tell
herself that "all that" lay far behind him. As we have seen, he owed
this change in his circumstances to a happy draw in the lottery of
marriage, a draw which has so often turned an adventurer of sorts into a
man of substance and integrity.

CHAPTER III

There is generally something a little dull and formal during the first
evening of a country house party; and if this is true when most of the
people know each other, how far more so is it the case with such a party
as that which was now gathered together at Wyndfell Hall!

Lionel Varick sat at one end of