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expensive cigarette smoke about him, and a rather more exciting one of after-shave lotion. Lucy judged him to be either in his late twenties or early thirties. She suddenly got out with a rush:
    “I—I haven’t thanked you yet for—for coming to my rescue as you did. But for you—”
    She felt herself go cold as she wondered what would have happened to her if he hadn’t come to her rescue. “You must have followed me ... ” she suggested.
    “I did.” He continued to keep his face averted, as if the people on the pavements fascinated him. “I realised you had all that money on you, and you didn’t appear to me to be behaving very sensibly.”
    “The—the man who tried to take the money from me, he had a—gun. He might have shot you!”
    He shook his head, and for the first time she saw him smile slightly.
    “Not he. He had no gun. That was merely a piece of bluff. He was what I would c all a natural-born opportunist who, when he took one look at you emerging from old Halliday’s office with your bag clutched underneath your arm, thought that the fates were being especially kind to him. You weren’t merely a sitting target, you were as good as plucked ... and I’m quite sure he’s reviling me in no uncertain terms at the moment because I interfered with a gift from the gods.”
    Lucy glanced shyly at his hands.
    “You gave him an awful bashing.”
    “I hope he has a sore jaw for weeks.”
    “The Countess will be—will be very grateful when I tell her.”
    At that he turned his face towards her sharply. “The Countess ap pe ars to be as impractical as you are, and I think she should be publicly rebuked for allowing a young woman like you to undertake the task of selling jewellery for her. Why couldn’t she sell it herself if she wanted it sold? Or why couldn’t she send someone else?”
    “Because there is no one else.”
    He studied her openly.
    “You mean that you and she live alone?”
    “Not quite alone, because we have Augustine to look after us ... and Augustine has been with madame for years. But madame is old, and so is Augustine—it’s as much as she can do to climb the stairs nowadays—and I am the only one who is capable of running errands.”
    “But—” She had already decided that there was something foreign about him, and he uttered an exclamation that sounded very foreign to her, and which she quite failed to translate—“selling jewellery is not running errands! It’s a job for an expert, or someone at least who understands the value of stones. Old Halliday is completely honest, but you could have been defrauded badly ...”
    Lucy shook her head, and this time it was she who smiled a little smile of amusement.
    “Not when I had already received my instructions from madame. She knows the value of every piece of jewellery in her jewelbox —every bracelet, necklace, ring, right down to a pair of small diamond studs—ear-studs.”
    His dark eyebrows elevated themselves.
    “Then your ‘ madame ’ is by way of being a wealthy woman, if she has all this jewellery?”
    But Lucy hastily corrected any false impression she had made.
    “Oh no, no! It’s all for Seronia. That’s to say, it’s for the restoration of the monarchy in Seronia. Madame only consented to sell this one piece today because—because we needed the money.”
    “I see,” he said again, and one corner of his mouth turned down somewhat bleakly. “It is to be hoped that Seronia acknowledges such generosity once the monarchy is restored; although so far as I know it is going along very nicely at the moment without a monarchy.”
    The taxi was drawing up outside No. 24 Alison Gardens, and Lucy prepared to alight. She clutched hold of her handbag and looked at the man who was so strangely reserved although he had been of the greatest possible assistance to her that morning. She attempted to thank him again.
    “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for keeping madame’s two thousand guineas intact for