Amanda Scott Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lechlade’s country house.
    They reached the first floor, and a low murmur of masculine voices drifted to her ears before the page stepped aside to allow her to pass through the tall arched entrance into the Great Subscription Room.
    “Over yonder,” the boy said tersely with a small gesture when she hesitated upon the threshold.
    But Sylvia had already spotted Greyfalcon, sitting at a table toward the rear of the room. Though she had told Lady Joan that she had no fear of failing to recognize her quarry, she had indeed experienced a qualm or two on her way to the club, for she had not seen the man in several years, but she knew now there had been no cause for such worry. Greyfalcon looked precisely as she remembered him.
    He was not built like Christopher, which had always surprised people who had met first one and then the other. Christopher had been of no more than medium height with very broad shoulders and the narrow waist but muscular thighs of the sporting man. He had been a bruising rider to hounds and a consistently merry companion, with the devil of mischief lurking always in his azure eyes. His hair had been blond and curly, his complexion fair and ruddy.
    Greyfalcon was taller, just over six feet, and although he had the same broad shoulders, his frame was sparer, almost lanky. His hands were particularly long and slender, elegant and graceful in their movement. Sylvia watched them now as he placed several chips out on the table before him. When his signet flashed in the light from the room’s hundreds of candles, her gaze moved to his face. There, too, the resemblance of Christopher was slight. Greyfalcon’s complexion, like his hair, was darker and his eyes seemed always hooded, as though he feared they might give away his thoughts. She knew they were darker than Christopher’s had been, indigo rather than azure, and she remembered suddenly that while Christopher’s had seemed always to be filled with warmth and laughter, his brother’s eyes could change in an instant from the ordinary to the dangerously chilling.
    The page behind her suddenly murmured his impatience to be gone; so, swallowing carefully, she placed the small packet she had so carefully prepared at Reston House upon the silver salver. Then, noting few of the famous room’s attributes other than the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, the glitter of a thousand candles, and the gray-and-black herringbone carpet beneath her reluctant feet, she pulled her cap a little more firmly down over her eyes and made her way across the room, wondering for the first time since leaving Oxfordshire if she was being very wise.

3
    O NLY TOO SOON DID Sylvia find herself at Greyfalcon’s table. The five men seated there were in the midst of a hand, and she knew at once that she would have to wait a few moments before daring to interrupt.
    The table was covered with green baize upon which had been painted a pattern of thirteen numbers, representing the value of the cards in each suit. An assortment of colored chips had been placed upon these numbers, and several of those chips had been “coppered,” which is to say that a penny had been placed upon each of them. In front of Greyfalcon, who held the bank, was an open-framed box from which, as Sylvia came to a halt at his elbow, he drew a card face up and laid it beside the box. It was the nine of spades.
    “Aha, nine the loser!” exclaimed the gentleman to Greyfalcon’s right, a dapper young man attired in a bright-green coat with tight red armbands. Perched atop his carroty hair was the most astonishingly beribboned straw hat Sylvia had ever clapped eyes upon. It was all she could do not to stare. The gentleman continued gleefully, “And my copper sitting right on my number-nine chip. Pay up, old man.”
    “Contain your soul in patience, Lacey,” recommended another of the gentlemen, this one older and more conservatively dressed. “The turn is incomplete and there might yet be a split.”
    “Aye,” put