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Lucy’s rescuer, whom the Countess seemed inclined t o overlook.
    “And you say that he brought you all the way to the door in a taxi? What a pity you couldn’t persuade him to come inside and receive Her Highness’s thanks! Her Highness should most certainly have thanked hi m!”
    “He didn’t want any thanks,” Lucy said quietly.
    And for the first time she remembered—and now it struck her as odd—that before saying that final, “Goodbye, mademoiselle ,” the dark-eyed man had asked her to convey his regards to Her Highness.
    Her Highness?
    How did he know that the Countess von Ardrath had the right to be referred to as ‘Highness’?
    Before she went back to her kitchen, looking very much happier than she had done in the morning, Augustine took the liberty of giving Lucy’s arm a squeeze.
    “It was an adventure, mademoiselle ,” she whispered. “And what is life without the little adventure?”
    The dinner that night seemed a fitting rounding off of such a day, or so Lucy thought. The dining-room of the maisonette was a grim apartment, containing some of the ugliest furniture she had ever seen—including a huge mahogany chiffonier with a cracked mirror, and an old fashioned round table covered, when it was not in use, with a chenille tablec l oth edged w ith bobble fringe—but Augustine went to a lot of trouble to give it a festive appearance. She draped the portraits of the Countess’s mother and father—the last King and Queen of Seronia—with some swathes of purple velvet, and put a vase of somewhat stunted daffodils in the middle of the dinner table. The cloth itself was heavy white damask, and the cutlery gleamed. So did the silver napkin rings beside each plate.
    Finger-bowls were brought out, too—exquisite, fragile affairs of Venetian glass—and over the damask cloth went lace table-mats. The half bottle of champagne was immersed in a silver ice bucket, and up to the very minute when the cork was withdrawn Augustine kept examining the cubes of ice to make certain they weren’t melting. As usual the room was over-warm, for the Countess couldn’t live in a moderate atmosphere, and Augustine kept plunging down the stairs to the kitchen to fetch fresh ice, until the Countess ordered her to stop being ridiculous and open the bottle.
    “We’ve drunk champagne before,” the old lady reminded her tartly. “Years ago I could have ordered you to fill my bath with it if I’d fancied a champagne bath. Our cellars were stocked with some of the noblest vintages.”
    It was then that she lifted her glass and uttered her toast.
    “To the future!” A wistful expression clouded her eyes. “And to my one and only grandson, Stanislav, who is far away in America, and whom I’ve never seen, but whom I hope to see before I die.”
    Lucy had often wondered about the Countess’s family connections, and now it transpired that she had a grandson. The champagne was loosening her tongue, and she confided:
    “It is he who pays me my allowance. Not a very large allowance, I will admit, but there are those who wouldn’t bother at all about an old woman like myself, and Stanislav has continued what his father started before him. My son Boris amassed quite a considerable fortune as a result of some enterprise he went in for, and the family is now settled in America.”
    “I’m surprised they haven’t sent for you before this,” Lucy couldn’t resist observing.
    The Countess’s eyes flashed, as if her pride was up in arms.
    “Why should they?” she demanded. “When I would be nothing but a nuisance to them. They have their own lives to lead, and I ... I have had my life. It would be different if my son were still alive. But he is dead. He was killed in some sort of a road accident a few years ago.”
    “And your grandson is married?” Lucy asked, not so much because she was curious but because she had the feeling her employer wanted to talk of the only blood relatives she could claim nowadays.
    The old