Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PEACHES AND CREAM " YOU would know the King of Spain, would you not ?" Nimbly Count Francisco Miguel de Llargo y Jimi- nez plunged his aristocratic right hand up to the wrist watch into an inside pocket and brought out a photograph. This he placed deferentially under the wide-eyed, pink and white face across the table. Lora Hollis drew in her breath and gazed, all dazzled, upon the likeness. In the good-humoured, loose-jowled Hapsburg features she recognised Alfonzo, lord of Castile and Aragon. "How perfectly, perfectly wonderful!" she told him in her infantile voice. She was glad that Tanquay's fashionable orchestra had stopped playing for a moment, so they could pitch their conversation to a confidential key. Again she took in Alfonzo's scraggly smile, blazoned above with towers and lions. It was as though she had been introduced already to this nice, kind king; and below the picture, boyishly scrawled, she read the royal message which served to establish the handsome Spaniard firmly in her regard: "Felicidad, mi Francisco! Siempre su amigo, Alfonzo." "You do know him awfully well, don't you!" she chirped. Being, by his own acknowledgment, an envoy extraordinary from a foreign court, Count Francisco received the compliment with the repression proper to ambassadors. His long olive face, which somehow reminded Lora of a beauti- . ""™"™ fully decorated egg, showed no expression, save that of his agate-coloured eyes, which drooped languidly as he reached across for the photograph. "You must remember, Senora, that the house of Llargo y Jiminez has been long associated with the court of Spain." "Oh, yes." He had said that to her several times during their brief but miraculously growing acquaintanceship. And now again he was launching forth upon ...