Love in High Places Read Free

dining-room was very splendid, and it was very full when Lou made her entrance with Valentine in attendance.
    Heads were turned to look at them as the maître d’hôtel himself bowed them to Lou’s table near one of the big windows. It was also in a corner, and further protected by a tall pillar and a torrent of colourful growth that was trained to climb upwards from the base of the pillar; but appreciative eyes peeped round the barricade at Lou in her shadowy black dress. There were iridescent green stones caught up in the folds of darkness, and they matched her emerald ear-rings, and her bracelet. Her shapely white shoulders were most effectively bare of any ornament, and her hair was brushed to one side of her head and swung in a lopsided golden cascade.
    “I shall go to bed early,” she announced, when she had consulted the menu. “I can do with an early night.”
    Valentine, who had been half hoping that they would sit and look on at the dancers — even if Lou was not in the mood to dance — repressed a pang of disappointment. She was wearing a very simple dress that had once belonged to her employer, but its tawny-gold colouring was peculiarly suited to her pale skin and arresting hair, and more than one of the pairs of eyes that were watching them dwelt on her. An Englishman who had arrived at the hotel only a few days before, and who was placed quite near to them, smiled at her suddenly across the vase of flowers on his table, and without quite realising what she was doing Valentine smiled back. Then her colour rose, and Lou regarded her quizzically.
    “Why are you blushing?” she asked. “Because someone looked at you?” She glanced round to see who the admirer was, recognised the Englishman as a man she had talked to that afternoon on the snow slopes, and sent him a casual blue-eyed smile on her own account. “That’s a fellow-countryman of yours, and a well - known novelist. You ought to get together some time,” she advised. “He obviously likes your type.”
    Then she grew petulant and pushed aside her plate, declaring she was too bored to eat, and the distant ballroom orchestra, playing a Viennese waltz, set her gold - covered feet moving restlessly under the table. She explained that, the night before, Alex had taught her to waltz in the Viennese manner, revolving continuously in a breathlessly glorious fashion until everything whirled round one — unless one kept one’s eye on the gentleman’s tie, and resisted the temptation to lose oneself in the liquid darkness of his eyes — and she was eager to try the experience again.
    To Valentine, with the stars pressing close to the window, and the frosty brilliance of the snow outside, the thought of having such an experience once in this warm, flower-scented atmosphere was an oddly pulse - quickening one just then.
    Perhaps because she was not likely to have it with the Baron von Felden, and even if the attractive Englishman asked her to dance ... he was looking her way again, with increasing interest ... she couldn’t possibly agree, being what she was. Cinderella dressed up in borrowed plumes (or rather, cast-off ones!) and granted an evening off. For to-morrow she would be so much at the beck and call of her employer that it might be an offence if she stopped to talk with one of the guests.
    Although on the other hand, if she happened to be in a good mood, Lou might hand her a whole day’s holiday quite graciously!
    Without waiting for the sweet, or the coffee, Lou lighted a cigarette and ordered her to talk to her.
    “Talk about anything,” she insisted. “Yourself, or ... anything! But preferably yourself! There must be a lot I don’t know yet about you.”
    This was so true that Valentine gazed at her thoughtfully. Several months before, in America, she and Lou had run across one another in a New York beauty parlour, and but for Lou’s intervention Valentine would have lost a much-needed job on the spot. She had most unfortunately