Royal Purple by Susan Barrie Page B

you accepted the tip she left for you last night,” she said demurely, directing a sideways look at his ultra-expensive tailoring.
    He produced a crisp pound note from a compartment of his note-case.
    “There it is.” He held it up in the sunshine. “I’m not at all sure what I’m going to do with it. I don’t think I shall spend it ...” A crinkle of amusement puckered the corner s of his eyes. “But I may have a little frame made for it one day.”
    “Why?” she enquired, genuinely perplexed.
    “For two reasons,” he told her softly. “Two very important reasons!” He put the pound note back in his note-case. “Now, Mademoiselle Lucy, I want to know the rest of your name. What is it? Mademoiselle Lucy— ? ”
    “Gray,” she supplied.
    He nodded.
    “Somehow that is very suitable. And how long have you known the Countess von Ardrath?”
    She told him: “Just over six months. I wanted a job, and the agency I went to sent me to the Countess. She fascinated me right from the beginning, and I’ve simply loved working for her. Oh, I knew right from the start, of course, that she was horribly poor, but I was horribly poor too, so it didn’t seem to matter. And I think I’ve fitted in to the household fairly well. The dogs—who are not very good-tempered because they really are grossly overfed—took to me in a way they don’t normally take to strangers, and even Augustine accepted me. Nowadays I believe she thinks of me as part of the background, as important to the Countess as her huge four-poster bed, and the rich cakes she likes for tea—when she can afford them!”
    “You say that you yourself are horribly poor,” he echoed her. “How long have you been poor, and why should this be so?”
    “Because my father never made any money, and when he died there was little or nothing for me. He was a naval officer who enjoyed his life, but I don’t think he should ever have married, because I don’t think he was ever in a position to support a wife. However, my mother died when I was a mere infant, and my father ’ s sister brought me up. She was very good to me in her way, and I missed her terribly after she too died.”
    “And that was when you decided to get a job?”
    “Yes. I’d been training in a half-hearted fashion to work amongst children, but on the death of my au n t I had to do something quickly, and that was when I heard of the Countess. She really is an extraordinary personality. So proud of her birth, and so full of her memories that I’m never dull, because I love listening to her, and yet not really minding about the ugliness of twenty-four Alison Gardens, and the pinching and scraping that went on there until a few days ago.”
    “When you sold the brooch?”
    “Yes.”
    He crossed one leg over the other, and she remarked the crease in his well-pressed trousers.
    “And is it really true that she still possesses a lot of expensive jewellery? Apart from the brooch that was disposed of the other day?”
    “Yes. But as I explained to you the other day Her Highness doesn’t look upon it as her own property. It is to realise funds for Seronia, and the cause of Seronia.”
    “Her Highness being the last surviving daughter of the old King of Seronia?”
    She looked swiftly sideways at him, and said, “Yes” again.
    “I’m a fr aid I consider your employer is misguided in her championship of such a lost cause as Seronia,” Paul Avery observed, flicking ash from his c igarette with the tip of a long forefinger. “But one can’t help admiring an old woman who denies herself in order to make possible a c herished ambition. However, I think she would display sense if she allowed the bank to take charge of her jewellery, and I hope she will never again get you to try and dispose of some of it for her. You must refuse if she asks you to do that sort of thing again.”
    “As a matter of fact, she is going to get Mr. Halliday to come and see her,” Lucy confided. “There are a few