Album Leaf is a 1933 novel by the British writer Marjorie Bowen, written under the pen name of Joseph Shearing.
[1] It was published in the United States in 1934 under the alternative title The Spider in the Cup, where it became a bestseller.
A young orphaned Englishwoman accepts an offer to become a paid companion to two reclusive aristocratic women in France.
There she encounters the daughter of the house, badly scarred following her suicide attempt after she had been unable to marry a cad now serving in French Algeria and her prospective husband, a cousin named Louis who is clearly after her money and spends a lot of his time experimenting with his chemistry.
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