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her. It would have been awful—in fact, it would have been a disaster!—if we had lost the money.”
    “It would have been a disaster for madame if she had lost you, I would say,” he remarked.
    He assisted her to alight, and he also insisted on paying the taxi fare.
    “If you attempt to open that bag of yours we’ll have a fresh catastrophe,” he observed.
    He smiled with a flash of beautiful, hard white teeth, and held out a hand to her.
    “Take care of yourself, mademoiselle, and if you take my advice you will look for a nice safe job in the country, exercising pet dogs, or something of the sort. Believe me, I think you are more cut out for that sort of thing than getting mixed up in the weighty affairs of Seronia.”
    Lucy realised that he hadn’t even told her h i s name—he hadn’t even asked for hers—and he was about to depart out of her life.
    “The Countess has three dogs, which I exercise daily,” she told him for something to say. Then, as she felt his long firm fingers clasping hers, “Won’t you come inside and meet madame ? Just for a moment,” she pleaded. “Let her thank you and offer you a glass of sherry.”
    A twinkle invaded his eyes.
    “If your employer has been forced to start selling her jewellery in order to meet expenses I wouldn’t wish to deprive her of her sherry,” he replied. “Be sides—”
    “But it’s good sherry,” she assured him. “Even when circumstances are very difficu l t madame wouldn’t dream of offering anyone—well, cooking sherry. ”
    “You intrigue me,” he said softly, and then to her astonishment he lifted her hand and carried it up to his lips. “I regret, however, that I have an appointment. Convey my regards to Her Highness, and tell her to cease worrying her head over Seronia. If she has anything to sell, tell her to sell it and enjoy the proceeds herself. And share them, of course, with you!”
    For one instant his eyes flicked over her shabby suit.
    “Goodbye, mademoiselle .”

 
    CHAPTER IV
    THAT night the Countess insisted upon a celebration dinner. She sent Augustine out to buy a small, plump chicken, some mushrooms, and a bundle of asparagus. She also instructed her to call in at a confectioner’s for a very rich gateau to serve as a sweet, and a wine merchant’s for half a bottle of champagne.
    “Tonight we will drink to the future,” she said to Lucy. “To your future, and the future of Seronia! We will not bother about mine, because I shall be eighty-eight next birthday, and that is eighteen years beyond my three score and ten. What little future lies ahead of me is not important.”
    Lucy had refrained from passing on to her the advice of the man who had brought her home in a ta x i that morning concerning Seronia. Her own private opinion was that the Countess had a perfect right to do what she pleased with her own possessions, and if it pleased her to further the cause of Seronia—or to delude herself into believing that she was furthering the cause—then that was her affair, and outside advice was hardly called for.
    At the same time, the Countess’s reaction to the sight of so much money had been a little surprising, and a hopeful portent for the next period of leanness. She had called Augustine into the room while she counted every one of the notes, and they had then been locked away in a drawer of her desk. She had then sat beaming and looking bemused in her chair, and said that there were several rings and other smallish items in the jewelbox which she might part with now that the mood was on her, only this time she would send for Mr. Halliday to come and see her, and not ask Lucy to conduct the negotiations for her. She had been obviously very perturbed when Lucy told her about the incident of the morning, and the man in the loud suit; but the girl was careful not to lay too much alarming emphasis on the whole episode, and only Augustine guessed that she was soft-pedalling things, and was loud in her praise of