Read Online Royal Purple by Susan Barrie - Free Book Online

rings and other small pieces she has decided to part with, and because of what happened to me the other day she thinks it safer to ask Mr. Halliday to come to her.”
    “That is belated wisdom,” Avery remarked.
    Lucy looked sideways at him again curiously.
    “In the taxi the other day you referred to the Countess as Her Highness,” she reminded him. “You said, ‘Convey my regards to Her Highness ... ’ How did you know that she is entitled to be addressed in that fashion?”
    He smiled down at her.
    “Perhaps be c ause I am a Seronian myself. Now,” he put his fingers under her elbow, “shall we go and find some tea?”
    Lucy enjoyed having tea with him more than anything that had ever happened to her in her life before. For one thing, he took her in a taxi to the Ritz, and it was only the second time in her life that she had entered such a haunt of the fashionable and the well-to-do.
    As she sat opposite him pouring out the tea, the one thing that puzzled her—and in which she found it hard to believe—was the strange paradox he himself presented, with his elegant clothes and his confident, well-bred manner, his air of ease and familiarity with such surrounding—from the point of view of the patrons of such establishments, not those who attended to their wants—and the position she knew that he filled as a waiter.
    She supposed that in these modern days a lot of people held down jobs for which they were not by birth entirely suited; but in the c ase of Paul Avery it wasn’t so much that his birth and upbringing had ill fitted him for his chosen method of earning a living, but as a result of some accident of birth it would be hard to imagine him filling any of the roles a well-bred man can fill and support a family and himself without attracting attention to himself, or giving rise to speculation.
    She tried to see him as a bank clerk, or as a doctor or lawyer. Admittedly he had the quiet gravity of a lawyer, and as a doctor his bedside manner would probably be well-nigh perfect, but he was not essentially cut out to be one or the other. That slight imperious lift of the hand when he was summoning a waiter—something the Countess von Ardrath had done the night before, and with considerable effect—the way his eyes remained cool and unabashed whatever the circumstances, and his well-marked brows lifted occasionally as if in surprise at something that in itself was not surprising, were things that set him apart.
    And he had an exceptionally attractive, beautifully modulated voice, rendered even more attractive by his slight accent. He spoke English perfectly and effortlessly, but anyone could tell that he was not an Englishman by birth. And the darkness of his hair and eyes was an intense darkness, alien to Englishmen.
    And there was another thing that had struck Lucy the night before. His fellow waiters had accorded him a deference that was rather in excess of the deference accorded by an underling to a superior. Or so it had struck Lucy.
    She found that he was smiling at her in amusement as she confronted him across the table with the teapot still clutched in one hand and poised midway between the tray and the tip of her nose.
    “What is it?” he asked. “You look as if something is puzzling you, bewildering you. Is there something about me that demands an explanation?”
    “I can’t understand why you are a—waiter,” she admitted, with simple truth. “I was absolutely astonished last night when you came to our table after the Countess had insisted on making a complaint to the head waiter.”
    “Dear me,” he remarked, helping himself to a chocolate éclair and licking his fingers where some of the chocolate had come off on them. “I begin to suspect that you are something of a snob. The next thing you will be telling me is that you can’t see me again because a young lady in your position has her reputation to think about, and the whole of Alison Gardens would be shocked if they knew you were