Blindfold by Patricia Wentworth Page A

over ears in a libel action.
    They had a pleasant little dinner, perfectly cooked and deftly served by two very decorative maids in scarlet. The table and chairs were of glass, semi-opaque and icy looking, with a concession to the climate in the shape of scarlet velvet cushions to the backless chairs. Floor, ceiling, and walls were a dull, lustreless black against which Mrs Freddy’s lacquered gold hair and alabaster skin, her scarlet mouth and finger-nails, were all most flatteringly relieved. She looked like a poet’s dream of a poster, and talked like the gossip page of a Society paper. It was quite entertaining.
    The prettier of the scarlet maids was filling his glass, when Mrs Freddy, with both elbows on the table and a cigarette lightly diffusing smoke over an already sufficiently flavoured omelette, addressed him in a low pulsing voice as “Darling Miles.”
    Flossie Palmer so nearly said “Coo!” that she turned hot and cold and her knees shook under her. With great self-control she kept her hand steady and filled the glass without spilling a drop.
    â€œDarling Miles,” said Mrs Freddy—“you’ve been too utterly exiled, but I thought everyone must have heard about Moldavia and the Grand Duke. He’s one of my very greatest friends, and he told me he had practically ruined himself buying her the Ethnovinsky pearls. Fancy being able to feel you were going about with a man’s whole fortune round your neck! Too marvellous! Freddy, my sweet, won’t you ruin yourself—just to give me the thrill of feeling you cared enough to do it?”
    Freddy, a cheerful thick-set young man with steady good-natured eyes, kissed his hand to her across the table.
    â€œNothing doing, darling.”
    The blue eyes rolled mournfully.
    â€œHe hasn’t got any soul,” she said. She puffed at her cigarette and the ash fell into her plate. “If anyone does want to ruin themselves for me, let it be black pearls—that’s all I ask. Too marvellous on my skin, wouldn’t they be? A long rope, you know, hanging down over something very filmy—not quite white—something like what I’ve got on.”
    â€œMiles is looking for a string of black pearls,” said the elder Gilmore with a sardonic gleam in his eye. “If he gets them, you can vamp him for them, or steal them and put up Freddy to take the blame. I daresay he’d go to prison for you at a pinch. Lila.”
    The blue eyes rolled again.
    â€œWould you, my sweet?”
    â€œNo, I wouldn’t,” said Freddy. “So you’d better not try it on, darling.”
    Lila Gilmore turned her attention to Miles.
    â€œYou know, when Narina Littlecote sold her sister-in-law’s rubies, there was a most terrible fuss. Narina told me all about it afterwards. She said no one had any idea how unkind Victoria had been. She said if it had been her, she’d have been only too glad to think the wretched things were being some use instead of just lying in a safe. Because you know, my dear, really they were too archaic—an absolutely pre-Edwardian necklace, with great vulgar lumps of stones plastered on with diamonds. And to think of Victoria ever wearing it positively made one blush. Well, as Narina said, it really was doing her a kindness—and Victoria was downright disagreeable about it. Why are you looking for a string of black pearls? What are you going to do with them when you’ve found them? You know, if you haven’t got the right skin for pearls, they make you look too, too repellent.”
    â€œI wasn’t thinking of wearing them myself,” said Miles, laughing.
    â€œDarling Miles, you’d look sweet! Perhaps just a shade too bronzed, but I expect you had a quite too marvellous complexion when you were a baby. Tell me all about the pearls. Ian and Freddy can talk to each other. Is it a real string? Has it been stolen? Are you being Miles Clayton, the