watch the barges on the river. That ought to have a soothing influence.

How perfectly terrible if I am stopped in the vestibule!...

  I was not stopped.

  Nobody seemed to see me go out.

But when I got out into the Strand, with its summer evening crowds of
people, I happened to glance across the street, and beheld some one that
I had just seen in my room--namely, the quiet-faced man from Scotland
Yard. How awful! I was being shadowed! It was a horrible feeling. So
horrible that I am sure it could not have been any worse if I had really
taken the Rattenheimer ruby, and had it fastened securely inside my
black coat at the moment!

I felt as if I had. I wondered if the man would come across and dog my
footsteps!

I turned down one of the little quiet streets on the right that lead to
the river, and then I did hear footsteps behind me. They were
following--positively following--me!

"Good evening!" said a quite friendly but un-English voice. It was not
the Scotland Yard detective, then, after all. I turned. It was the young
American.

                              CHAPTER XXII

                        HER COUSIN TO THE RESCUE

"GOOD evening," I said, coldly looking up at the young man, with a
glance that said as plainly as possible, "What do you want?"

"I hoped you might be kind enough to allow me to escort you on this
little stroll of yours, Miss Smith," said the young American politely,
lifting his grey felt hat. "See here, I guess I'd better introdooce
myself. I'm Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago."

"You are a detective, too, I suppose," I said, still more coldly. We
were standing by the railings of the old London churchyard close to the
river. The dark-green leaves of the plane-trees rustled above us. "I
suppose you are following me to find out if I'm taking Mr.
Rattenheimer's ruby to a pawnshop?"

The young American smiled cheerfully down at me.

"Nix on the detective racket here," he said, in his queer, slow,
pleasant accent. "You can cut out that about Rats and his ruby, I guess.
I don't care a row o' beans where his old ruby has gann to. What I
wanted to ask you about was----" He concluded with a most unexpected two
words--

  --"My cousin!"

I stared up at this big young stranger in the padded grey coat.

"Your cousin? But--I think you're making some mistake----"

"I guess not," said the young American. "You're my cousin's maid all
right, aren't you? You're Miss Million's maid?"

"Yes. Yes, of course," I said, clinging on to that one straw of fact in
an ocean of unexpectedness. "I'm her maid----"

"And I'm her cousin," said the young American simply. "Second cousin, or
second, once removed--or something of that sort. You haven't heard of
me?"

"No, I never have heard of any of Miss Million's cousins," I said,
shaking my head with a gesture of firm disbelief. For I summed up his
claim to relationship with my mistress as being about as authentic as
the Honourable Jim's alleged friendship with her uncle.

Only the fibbing of this second young man seemed rather more shameless!

I said: "I didn't know that Miss Million had any cousins."

"And you don't believe it now you hear it? Is that so?" he said, still
smiling cheerfully. "Why, it's quite right to be on the side of caution.
But you're overdoing it, Miss Smith. I'm related to old man Million
right enough. Why, I'm at the boss-end of no end of his business. The
Sausage King. Well, I've been the Sausage Prince. I see you looking at
me as much as to say, 'You say so.' See here, d'you want some proofs?
I've a wad of letters from the old man in my pocket now."

He put his hand to the breast of the grey-tweed jacket.

"Maybe you think those aren't proofs, either? Write myself a few
billets-doux signed, 'Yours cordially, Sam Million'--easy as falling off
a horse, eh?"

(Of course, this was what I had thought.)

"I guess I shall have to take you and my cousin along with me to our
lawyers the next time I'm calling, that's all," concluded the young
American with his cheerfully philosophical air. "Chancery Lane, Messrs.
Chesterton, Brown, Jones, and Robinson. That's the firm."

"Oh! You know Mr. Chesterton!" I exclaimed in accents of relief. I'd
quite forgotten Miss Million's dear old family lawyer. That nice old
gentleman! If I wanted advice or help of course there was Mr. Chesterton
to fall back on! I hadn't thought of him before.

"Know Mr. Chesterton? Sure thing," said the American. We had moved away
from the churchyard railings and were strolling slowly towards the
embankment now. "Why, Mr. Chesterton and I had a long, long
heart-to-heart talk this afternoon, before I came on in the great
trunk-searching act! I was just coming in to leave a card on my cousin,
Miss Nellie Million, when I found myself one of the galaxy of beauty and
talent that was going to make a thorough examination of you girls'
things."

"Oh, were you?" I said lamely. I couldn't think what else to say. Too
many things had been happening all day long!

I said: "Miss Million didn't know you were coming?

"Why, no! I guess she didn't suspect my existence, any more than I
suspected hers until a few weeks ago," said Miss Million's cousin. (At
last I found myself believing that he really was her cousin after all.)
"Horrible shock to me, I can tell you, that my Uncle Sam was cherishing
the thought of this little English niece of his all this time! Making up
his mind to leave his pile to this girl. Meantime Hiram P. Jessop," here
he tapped the grey-tweed jacket again, "had been looking upon himself as
the heir-apparent!"

"Oh! You thought all that money was coming to you?" I said, half-amused,
half-pityingly, for this was certainly the frankest, most boyish sort of
young man I'd ever come across. "And you've lost it all on account of my
mistress?"

"Say, doesn't that sound the queerest ever? A daisy little girl like you
talking about some other girl as her 'mistress'!" rejoined my companion
in a wondering tone. "Why, d'you know? When I saw you standing there in
the sitting-room, in your black dress and that cute little apron and
cap, I said to myself: 'If this isn't the image of some Society girl of
the English upper class playing the Pretty Domestic part in some private
theatricals where they rush you a quarter's salary, I guess, for half a
look and a programme!' I said, if you'll pardon me: 'It's just the
accent, just the look, just the manner.'"

"Oh!" I said, rather vexed.

I was annoyed that he should think there was any trace of "acting"
about my appearance. I thought I'd had the art that conceals Art. I
thought I'd come to look such an irreproachable lady's-maid.

"Just typically the English Young Lady of the Upper Classes," pronounced
this surprising young American, meditatively walking along by my side on
the asphalt paths of the Embankment Gardens. "As typical as the
Westminster Abbey, or those tea-shops.... Real sweet-looking, real
refined-looking, if I may say so. But cold! Cold and stiff! 'Do not dare
to approach me, for all my family were here dying of old age when
William the Conqueror landed on these shores.' That's the way you'd
impress one, Miss Smith. 'Look through my trunks?'" Here he adopted an
extraordinary voice that I suppose was intended for an imitation of my
own tones.

Then he pulled himself up and said gravely: "You'll pardon me if I'm too
frank. But I'm always outspoken. It's my nature. I'm interested in
types. I was interested in yours. Noo to me. Quite noo. The young lady
that looks as if she ought to be standing to have her portrait painted
on the grey-stone steps of some big English country house--the young
lady that turns out to be paid maid to my own cousin! A noo thing."

"Really!" I said gravely. I couldn't help feeling amused at his puzzled
face.

We turned again down the asphalt path between the flower-beds of those
gardens that are overshadowed by the big hotel. On a bench I caught
sight again of the quiet figure that I had noticed on the other side of
the Strand. It was the Scotland Yard man. He seemed to be reading an
evening paper. But I felt that he was watching, watching....

I didn't mind; even if he did think he was watching some one who knew
what had become of the Rattheimer ruby! I felt something comforting and
trustworthy in the presence of this other young man; this peculiar
cousin of Million's, from whom one heard, quite unresentfully, remarks
that one would not forgive in an Englishman, for instance Mr. Brace. Not
that Mr. Brace would ever venture on such personalities ... the
Honourable Jim now.... Yes, but he's a Celt. A Celt is a person who
takes, but cannot give, offence. Most unfair, of course.

The American pursued: "And this cousin of mine? There's another type I
shall be interested to see. Tell me about her, Miss Smith, will you?
Have you known her long?"

"Oh, yes," I said. "It's some years since I've known Miss Million."

"And well, considering the difference in your positions, that is?"

"Oh, yes, fairly well," I said, thinking of the many artless confidences
I'd listened to from Miss Million--then "Million," of our disgracefully
inconvenient little kitchen at Putney. Those far-away days seemed very
pleasant and peaceful to me to-night! But they--those kitchen days--were
no part of the business of the young man at my side.

"D'you get on with her?" he said.

  "Oh, yes, thank you."

"You don't tell me much. It's this English reserve I'm always up
against. It's a thing you'd need an ice-axe for, I guess, or a hundred
years with your families living in the same village," complained the
young American, laughing ruefully.

"Were you two girls raised together? School together?"

"Oh, no."

He sighed and went off on another tack.

"Can't you tell me the way she looks, so as to prepare me some for when
I see her?" he suggested. "Does she resemble you, Miss Smith?"

"I don't think so," I said, suppressing a foolish giggle. It was the
first time I'd wanted to laugh at anything for the last twenty-four
hours. "No; Miss Million is--well, she's about my height. But she's
dark."

"I've always admired the small brunette woman myself," admitted Mr.
Hiram P. Jessop, adding quickly and courteously: "Not that I don't think
it's perfectly lovely to see a blonde with the bright chestnut hair and
the brown eyes that you have."

  "Thank you," I said.

"And how soon can I see this little dark-haired cousin of mine?" went on
the American when we turned out of the Gardens. Unobtrusively the
Scotland Yard man had risen also. "What time can I call around this
evening?"

"I--I don't know when she'll be in," I hesitated.

"Where's she gone to?" persisted the cousin of this missing heiress.
"How long did she go for?"

I fenced with this question until we arrived at the very doors of the
Cecil again.

  Then an impulse seized me.

All day long I had wrestled alone with this trouble of mine. I hadn't
consulted Mr. Brace. I had kept it from the Honorable Jim. I had put up
all sorts of pretences about it to the people at the hotel. But I felt
now that it would have to come out. I couldn't stand it any longer.

I turned to Miss Million's cousin.

"Mr. Jessop, I must tell you," I said in a serious and measured voice.
"The truth is I don't know!"

"What?" he took up, startled. "Are you telling me that you don't know
where my cousin is at this moment?"

  I nodded.

"I wish I did know," I said fervently. And as we stood, a little aside
from the glass doors in the vestibule, I went on, in soft, rapid tones,
to tell him the story of Miss Million's disappearance from my horizon
since half-past eleven last night.

I looked up, despairingly, into his startled, concerned face.

"What has happened to her?" I said urgently. "What do you think? Where
do you think she is?"

Before he could say a word a messenger came up to me with a telegram.

  "For Miss Smith."

I felt that this would be news at last. It must be. I seized the wire; I
tore it open.

I read----

"Oh!" I cried quite loudly.

One of the commissionaires glanced curiously over his shoulder at me.

I dropped my voice as I said feverishly: "Yes, it is! It's from HER!"

And I held the telegram out, blindly, towards the young American.

The telegram which my mistress had sent ran simply and superbly thus:

    "Why ever don't you bring my clothes?
                                    "MISS MILLION."

There was no address.

The wire had been handed in at half-past seven o'clock that evening at
Lewes. It left me silent for a moment with bewilderment and dismay.
After waiting so long for a message! To receive one that told me
nothing!

"What is the meaning of this here?" said Miss Million's cousin,
repeating, in the accent that makes all our English words sound
something new and strange. "'Why ever don't you bring my clothes?' Well!
I guess that sounds as if nothing very terrible had happened to her. Her
clothes! A woman's first thought, of course. Where does she want you to
'bring' them to, Miss Smith?"

"How on earth should I know?" I cried, in desperation. "When I still
don't know where she is, or what she is doing!"

"But this place, Lewes. Surely that's some guide to you?"

"Not the slightest," I said. "We don't know anybody at Lewes! At least,
I don't know that she knew anybody there! I don't know who on earth can
have taken her there!" This with another nervous thought of young Lord
Fourcastles. "I shall have to go at once--no, it's too late to-night.
To-morrow I shall go. But----

"She may not be there at all. She may have been motoring through when
she sent this absurd wire!"

"Maybe," said the American. "But it's a clue, for all that. Lewes! The
post-offices at Lewes will tell you something about her."

"Why, why didn't she tell me something about herself?" I stormed softly.
"Here she is taking it for granted that I know exactly what's happened
and where she's gone! Does she imagine that she explained that to me
last night before she went out? Does she think she gave me any orders?
Here she is actually asking 'why?' to me!" I concluded, stammering with
indignation. "She sounds quite furious because I haven't brought her
clothes to her----somewhere in Space!"

"What clothes was she wearing, may I ask?" demanded the American cousin,
in his simple, boyishly interested manner.

And when I told him of the bright, cherry-coloured evening gown, and the
creamy restaurant coat, and the little cerise satin shoes with jewelled
heels that Million had on, he put back his head and laughed gently.

"Poor little girl! Poor little Cousin Nellie! I guess she must have been
real mad with herself and you for letting her loose in that get-up," he
said, "prancing about all day in the bright sunlight in that outfit.
Enough to jar any girl of taste in dress, I guess!"

Then his alert face grew grave again. He said, glancing over his
shoulder at the groups that were coming and going in the vestibule:
"Well, we'll discuss this. Come into the lounge, where we can talk
quietly."

We went into the lounge, where only yesterday I had perceived for the
first time the sumptuous apparition of Miss Vi Vassity pouring out tea
for my now vanished mistress.

It seemed to me that everybody there looked up at me as we passed in. I
bit my lip and frowned a little.

"You are right. This is no place for a quiet chat," said the American
softly. "It will have to be my cousin's sitting-room again, I reckon."

Upstairs, in Miss Million's sitting-room, that I seemed to know as well
now as a penal-servitude prisoner knows his cell, the American said to
me gravely and quietly: "There is one thing, I daresay, which you have
not thought of in connection with that----"

He nodded his smooth, mouse-coloured head at the tantalising wire that I
still held crushed in my hand.

"Now, I don't know much about your police system," said young Mr.
Jessop, "but I reckon it won't be so very different from our own in a
matter of this nature." He nodded again, and went on gravely:

"That telegram will have been read all right! The people here, the
manager and the Scotland Yard man, they will know what's in that."

"Know what's in it?" I gasped, staring at him. "Why, how can they? Do
you mean," indignantly, "that they opened it?"

"Why, no! You saw for yourself the envelope was not opened when you got
the thing. But that is not to say that they could not get it repeated,
as easy as winking, at the post-office," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of
Chicago. "So I'd be ready to bet that everybody here knows what you're
up to when you leave this hotel to-morrow. My old acquaintance, Rats,
and all of 'em. They'll know you're taking something to your young
mistress--your confederate, they'll think her!--in Sussex. You may be
quite sure they're not going to allow you to take any trips into
Sussex--alone. Nope. Somebody will go with you, Miss Smith."

"Go with me? D'you mean," I said, "that I shall be shadowed all the way
by that odious detective man?"

"Well, now, isn't it more than probable, Miss Smith?" said the young
American shrewdly. "They'd their eye on you two girls from the start, it
seems. You aren't a very usual couple. Noo to me, you are. Both of you
seemed noo to them!"

"I knew they gossiped about us!" I said ruefully.

"Sure thing; but don't say 'gossip' as if it was something nobody else
did only the folks around this hotel!" protested the American,
twinkling. "Well, to-day after the great Jewel Steal you aroused
considerable suspicion by refusing to let Rats and the others do the
Custom House officer's act through your wardrobe. This wire will have
raised more suspicion this evening. And to-morrow--d'you think they're
going to let you quit without further notice taken? Think!"

  I thought for a second.

  I saw that he was perfectly right.

It was just what would happen. Wherever I went to-morrow in search of
that baffling mistress of mine I should have that Scotland Yard
detective on my heels!

That sort of thing made me terribly nervous and uneasy! But I could
imagine the ingenuous Million being forty times worse about it! If I did
succeed in running her to earth at last, I could just imagine Million's
unconcealed and compromising horror at seeing me turn up with a
companion who talked about "the necessary steps" and "the Law!"

Million would be so overwhelmed that she would look as if she had a
whole mine full of stolen rubies sewn into the tops of her corsets. She
has a wild and baseless horror of anything to do with the police. (I saw
her once, at home, when a strange constable called to inquire about a
lost dog. It was I who'd had to go to the door. Million had sat,
shuddering, in the kitchen, her hand on her apron-bib, and her whole
person suffering from what she calls "the palps.")

So this was going to be awkward, hideously awkward.

Yet I couldn't go out in search of her!

I said, desperately: "What am I to do about it?"

"There is only one thing for it as far as I can see," said the young
American thoughtfully; "you will have to let me go down with a suit-case
full of lady's wearing apparel. You will have to let me make all the
inquiries in Lewes."

"You? Oh, no! That is quite impossible," I exclaimed firmly. "You could
not."

"Why not? I tell you, Miss Smith, it seems to me just to meet the case,"
he said earnestly.

"Here's this little cousin of mine, that I have never yet seen, that
I've got to make friends with. I am to be allowed to make her
acquaintance by doing her a service. Now, isn't that the real,
old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon chivalry? It would just appeal to me."

"I don't think it would appeal to Miss Million," I said, "to have a
perfectly strange young man suddenly making his appearance in the middle
of--wherever she is, with a box full of all sorts of her things, and
saying he is her cousin! No, I shall have to go," I said.

And then a sudden awful thought struck me. How far could I go on the
money that was left to me? Three and sixpence!

"My goodness! What's the railway fare from Victoria, or wherever you go
to Lewes from? I don't believe I have got it!" I turned to the young man
with a resigned sigh of desperation. "I shall have to borrow from you,"
I said.

"With great pleasure," said the young American promptly. Then, with a
twinkle, he added swiftly: "See here, Miss Smith. Cut out the railroad
business altogether. Far better if you were to permit me to take you
down by automobile. Will you let me do that, now? I can hire an
automobile and tear off a hundred miles or so of peaceful English
landscape before anybody has had time to say 'How very extraordinary!'
which is the thing they always are saying in England when any remark is
put forward about what they do in the States. Pack up my cousin's
contraptions to-night, will you? To-morrow morning, at nine or eight or
seven if you like, we'll buzz out of this little old town and play
baseball with all the police traps between here and Brighton! Does this
appeal to you?"

I could not help feeling that this did very considerably appeal to me.

If I went with this un-English, unconventional, but kind and helpful
young man, I should at least not feel such a lone, lorn female, such a
suspect in the eyes of the law! I could rise superior to the dogging of
detectives, just as I had risen superior to them this evening in the
Embankment Gardens.

Suffragists and college-educated girls and enlightened persons of that
sort may say what they choose on the subject of woman becoming daily
more self-reliant and independent of man.

But I don't care. The fact remains that to the average girl-in-a-scrape
the presence of man, sympathetic and efficient, does still appear the
one and only and ideal prop!

Bless Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago! I was only too thankful to accept
the offer of his escort--and of his car!

Before he left me I had arranged to meet him at a certain garage at nine
o'clock in the morning.

"Bright and early, as we may want to have the whole day before us," said
the American as he went out. "Till then, Miss Smith!"

                             CHAPTER XXIII

                          I START ON THE QUEST

AND now to set about sorting out some of these "clothes," after which my
young mistress inquires so peremptorily! It won't take me long, thanks
to the apple-pie order in which I keep them all. (So much easier to be
"tidy" with new and gorgeous garments than it is with a chest of drawers
full of makeshifts!)

I shall take her dressing-bag with the crystal-and-ivory fittings. That
ought to impress even the Fourcastles' ménage, assuming that Lord
Fourcastles has carried her off to his people's. I wonder whose dressing
things and whose dress Miss Million made use of to-day? For, seriously,
of course, she can't have gone "prancing about" in "me cerise
evenin'-one." She must have worn borrowed plumes for the day--plumes
probably miles too long for the sturdy little barn-door chicken that
Million is! I wonder, I wonder from whom those plumes were borrowed?
Please Heaven I shall know by this time to-morrow night!...

Here's her week-end case packed up. The choice of two costumes; the blue
cloth and the tobacco-brown taffeta; blouses; a complete set of
luxurious undies. Even the slip petticoat was an "under-dress" according
to the shops Miss Million patronised! Shoes; a hat; a motor-veil and
wrap. Yes, that's all.

That ought to do her--when we get the things to her!

But now to bed and to sleep the sleep of exhaustion after quite the most
crowded day of my whole life.

To-morrow for Lewes--and more adventure!

We were shadowed on our Lewes journey, though scarcely in the way that I
had anticipated. However, to begin at the beginning.

At nine o'clock this morning, in spite of all difficulties, I did find
myself free of the "Cecil" and away in a two-seater with my mistress's
luggage, sitting beside my mistress's cousin and whirling through the
dull and domesticated streets of South London.

It was a gorgeous June day, just the very day for a quick flight out
into the country. In spite of my anxiety about my mistress my spirits
rose and rose. I could have sung aloud for joy as we left grimy London
behind us and found ourselves whirling nearer the green heart of the
country.

"This is better than your first idea of the railroad trip, Miss Smith?"
said the young American at my side.

"Oh, far more enjoyable," I agreed so eagerly that he laughed.

"There is another thing about that," he said. "I suppose you haven't
thought of what they would do if they saw you going off by train
anywhere?"

"What?" I asked, looking up at him with startled eyes.

"Why, they would wire to every station along the line to take notice
where you got off before Lewes, and to follow up all your movements,
you real, artful, detective-dodging little diamond thief you," declared
my companion teasingly.

And I saw him simply shaking with laughter over the steering-wheel as he
went on.

"The brilliant idea of Rats, and the manager, that you and my little
cousin Nellie should have gotten hold of his old ruby!"

"You knew at once," I said, "that we hadn't!"

And he laughed easily and said: "It didn't take much guessing when he
had seen me and knew that Nellie Million was a relative of his and a
niece of the old man's."

"Jewel thieves, not much!" he said in his quick, reassuring accent.

I said: "Well! I hope you put in a good word for us with that odious
little Jew man that lost the ruby."

"Not on your life! I just love to watch somebody who thinks they are too
quick and clever to live go over-reaching themselves some," said the
American good-humouredly.

How funny it felt to be sitting there beside him, while the hedges
whirled past--I, who had never set eyes on the young man before
yesterday, now joining him in this wild quest of a cousin whom he had
never yet seen!

"Oh, dear! I wonder if we shall find her!" I murmured.

"Why, I am determined not to close an eye to-night until we do, Miss
Smith," said the missing heiress's cousin, gravely looking ahead at the
sliding ribbon of white road. "It's a matter of some little importance
to me that we find her soon. It is also no less important what I think
of her when we do meet!"

I was a little surprised to hear him speak so impressively. Naturally,
when one is going to meet a relative for the first time one wonders what
sort of a mutual impression will be made. But why had this young man
said so seriously that this was "important"?

He seemed to read my thoughts, for, as we cleared a village and came out
into a long stretch of wide and empty road, he turned to me and said:
"You know, it is as a matter of business that I am coming to see this
cousin of mine and this mistress of yours. I have got to have a little
serious heart-to-heart talk with her on the subject of the old man's
money."

"Why?" I asked, startled. "Isn't it safe in that factory place where Mr.
Chesterton said it had better be kept?"

"Oh, it is safe enough there," he said. "The question is, is all that
money going to be allowed to remain in the hands of one little
dark-haired girl without let or hindrance, as the lawyers say?"

"Allowed?" I echoed. "But who is to disallow it?"

There was a moment's silence.

Then the young American said meditatively: "I might! That is, I might
have a try. True, it mightn't come off. I don't say that it is bound to
come off. But, between you and me, the old gentleman was remarkably
queer in his head when he made that second will, leaving the whole pile
to his niece, Miss Nellie Million. The will he made a couple of years
before, leaving everything to his nephew, Hiram P. Jessop, might be
proved to be the valid one yet, if I liked to go setting things to
work."

At the sound of this a dark cloud seemed to blot out some of the June
sunshine that was steeping the white roads and the hawthorn hedges and
the emerald-green fields of corn "shot" with scarlet poppies.

Poor little unsuspecting Million! Wherever she was, she had not an idea
of this--that the fortune which she had only just begun to enjoy might
be yet snapped out of her hands, leaving no trace of it behind but the
costly new trousseau of clothes, a gorgeous array of trunks, and an
unpaid hotel bill!

How terrible! It would be worse than if she had never had any money at
all! For it is odd how quickly we women acclimatise ourselves to
personal luxuries, even though we have not been brought up to them. For
instance, already since I had had my own new things I felt that I could
never bear to go back to lisle thread or cashmere stockings again. Only
silk were possible for Miss Million's maid! Another awful thought.
Supposing Miss Million ceased to be an heiress? She would then cease to
require the services of a lady's-maid. And then I should be indeed upon
the rocks!

Again that weird young American seemed to read my thoughts. Dryly he
said: "You see yourself out of a job already, Miss Smith?"

"No, indeed, I don't," I said with spirit. "You have not got the money
yet, my mistress is still in possession of it."

"And possession is nine-tenths of the law, you mean," he took up; "still
I might choose to fight on the tenth point, mightn't I?"

He put back his head and laughed.

"Perhaps I shan't have to fight. This entirely depends upon how Nellie
and I are going to fix it up when we do meet," he said cheerily.

"We have got to find her first," I said, with a feeling of apprehension
coming over me again. And this young American who may have control of
our future (mine and Miss Million's) said cheerfully: "We are going to
find her or know why, I guess. Don't you get worrying."

Such an easy thing to say: "Don't worry"!

As if I hadn't had enough to worry me already! Now this fresh
apprehension! I felt my face getting longer and longer and more
despondent inside the frame of the thin black motor-scarf with which I
had wreathed my hat. The young American glanced at it and smiled
encouragingly.

"I guess you are starving with hunger," he said; "I'll wager you hadn't
the horse sense to eat a decent breakfast before you started away from
the 'Cess'? Tea and toast, what? I knew it. Now, see here, we are going
to climb right down and have a nice early lunch at the first hostelry
that we come to, with honeysuckle and English roses climbing over the
porch."

It was hardly a mile further on that we came to a wayside inn such as
he had described. There it was, a white-washed, low-roofed house, with
roses and creepers, with a little bit of green in front of it, and a
swinging painted sign, and a pond not far off, with a big white duck and
a procession of little yellow ducklings waddling towards it across the
road.

It looked quite like a page out of a Caldecott picture-book. The only
twentieth-century detail in it was the other two-seater car that was
drawn up just in front of the porch. This was a car very much more
gorgeous than the hireling in which we were setting forth on our quest.
She--this other car--appeared to be glitteringly new. The hedge-sparrow
blue enamel and the brass work were a dazzlement to the eyes in the
brilliant June sunshine. In front there was affixed the mascot, a
beautiful copy of "The Winged Victory," modelled in silver.

I wondered for a moment who the lucky owner of such a gem of cars might
be.

And then, even as I descended from the hireling, and entered the inner
porch with my companion, I thought of the last time that I had heard a
small car mentioned.

That was Lord Fourcastles's!

The gnarled-looking old woman who kept this decorative-looking inn shook
her head doubtfully over the idea of being able to let us have lunch as
early as all that.

"Mid-day dinner," she informed us rather reproachfully, "was at
mid-day!"

However, if bread and cheese and cider would do us those we could have.
She had taken a tray with those on already to the gentleman who had
driven up in a small car, if we wouldn't mind having it in the little
coffee-room with him.

Thankfully enough I preceded Mr. Jessop into the coffee-room. It was
long, and low-ceilinged, and dark from the screen of tangled ivy and
honeysuckle and jasmine that grew up about the low window. Inside was a
framed picture of Queen Victoria as a blonde girl in a dressing-gown
receiving the news of her accession to the English throne. Another
picture showed her in Jubilee robes. There were also cases of stuffed
birds and squirrels, padded chairs with woollen antimacassars. At the
further table there loomed against the light the broad back of a man
eating bread and cheese and reading a newspaper. From the look of him,
he was the owner of that sumptuous car.

My American friend exclaimed in delight.

"Well, now, if any one had told me there still existed anything so real
old-fashioned and quaint right close up to the most sophisticated old
town in Europe I would never have believed them!" he ejaculated. "It
takes Old England to supply anything in the nature of a setting for
romance. Doesn't this look the exact parlour where the runaway couple
would be fixing things up with the relenting pa on the way back from
Gretna Green, Miss Smith?"

I laughed as I said: "It is rather a long way from here to Gret----"

Here there was a sudden noise of a man springing quickly to his feet.

The guest, who had been sitting there over his bread and cheese and
cider, swung swiftly round.

"By the powers, but this is a delightful surprise!" he exclaimed.

I stared up at him with eyes now grown accustomed to the dimness of the
inn parlour. I beheld, handsomer and more débonnaire than ever, no less
a person than the Honourable Jim Burke!

As I shook hands I wondered swiftly from whom this blue-eyed pirate had
borrowed the brand-new, spick-and-span little car that stood outside
there with her nose and the mascot that was its ornament turned towards
London.

I saw young Mr. Jessop staring with all his shrewd yet boyish eyes. I
wondered what on earth he thought of my very conspicuous-looking friend;
no, I can't call him "friend" exactly, my conspicuous-looking
acquaintance to whom I hurriedly introduced him?

"Very happy to meet you," said the American, bowing. Mr. Burke, with the
most extraordinary flavour of an American accent tinging his brogue,
added: "Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Jessop."

Without my seeing how he did it exactly, Mr. Burke had arranged the
chairs about his table so that we all sat at lunch there together. But
he changed his seat so that it was Mr. Jessop who sat with his face to
the light, opposite to the man I had known just a very little longer.

Really, it does seem odd to think that I am the same Beatrice Lovelace
who used to live at No. 45 Laburnum Grove! There, from year's end to
year's end, I never exchanged a single word with anything that you
could describe as a young man!

And now, to parody the old story about the 'bus driver, "Young men are
no treat to me!" Within forty-eight hours I have had one propose to me,
one taking me out for a walk on the Embankment and arranging to bring me
for this motor expedition to-day, and a third having lunch with me and
the second!

It was a very funny lunch. And not a very comfortable one. The two men
talked without ceasing about automobiles, and "makes," and garages, and
speeds, and the difference between American and English workmen. (Mr.
Burke really does seem to know something about America.) But I felt that
the air of that shady coffee-room was simply quivering with the thoughts
of both of them on very different subjects. Mr. Jessop was thinking:
"Now, see here! Who's this young Irish aristocrat? He seems to be on
such perfectly friendly terms of equality with my cousin's maid. How's
this?"

Mr. Burke was thinking: "Who the dickens is this fellow? How is it that
Miss Million's maid seems to be let loose for the whole day without her
mistress, and a young man and a car to herself?"

The keynote of the next half-hour might be summed up in Kipling's
phrase, "Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he dare not say!"

My heart meanwhile was bursting with the wild longing to find out if Mr.
Burke knew anything at all of the whereabouts of my mistress.

I decided that he did not, for if he had wouldn't he have mentioned
something to do with her?

As it was, which I am sure was buzzing in all of our brains, the name
Million did not pass any of our lips!

The men went out together, apparently on the most friendly terms, to pay
the landlady and exchange inspection of the "automobiles." By some
manoeuvring or other Mr. Burke contrived to come back first into the
coffee-room where I stood alone before the mirror readjusting the black
gauze scarf.

He came behind and spoke to my reflection in the mirror, smiling into
the eyes that met his own blue and unabashed ones in the glass.

"Child, a word with you," murmured the Honourable Jim in his flattering
and confidential tones. "Will you tell me something? Does all this mean,
now, that my good services are no longer required in the way of
introducing to you with a view to matrimony the wealthy alien that I
mentioned at that charming tea the day before yesterday, was it?"

"What do you mean, Mr. Burke?" I said. "What do you mean by all this?"

The Honourable Jim jerked his smooth black head towards the window,
whence he could get a glimpse of the waiting cars.

"I mean our friend, the American Eaglet, who is so highly favoured that
he doesn't even have to wait until Friday afternoon off," said the
Honourable Jim softly, watching my face, "for his flights with the
little black-plumaged pigeon."

Naturally when one is watched one colours up. Who could help it? The
Honourable Jim said rather more loudly: "I'll tell you something. You
have every symptom about you of a girl who has had a proposal of
marriage in the last couple of days. Didn't I see it at lunch? The way
you held your head! The new pride in your voice! Something in the very
movement of the hand----"

He caught me very gently by the wrist of my left hand as he spoke. I
hadn't yet put on my gloves.

"No ring there," said the Honourable Jim, dropping the hand again.
"But--Miss Lovelace, child! Will you deny to me that some one has not
proposed to you since you and I had tea together?"

At that I could not help thinking of poor Mr. Brace in Paris. He would
be coming over at the end of the week to receive the answer which I had
not yet had time to think about. I was so amazed at Mr. Burke's
perspicacity that I could not help reddening even deeper with pure
surprise. The Irishman said softly: "I am answered! Tell me, when are
you going over to the Stars and Stripes?"

Good heavens! what an idiotic mistake. He really imagined that the man
who had proposed to me was not Mr. Brace, but Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of
Chicago! I protested incoherently: "Why! I only met him last night."

"What is time to love?" laughed Mr. Burke.

"But don't be so ridiculous," I besought him. "This Mr. Jessop has
nothing to do with me! He is----" Here the conversation was stopped by
the entrance of Mr. Jessop himself.

I think Mr. Hiram P. Jessop soon discovered that Mr. Burke had made up
his mind about one thing.

Namely, that he meant to start first from the inn where we'd lunched!

He rose to say good-bye, and to add that he must be "off" so very
firmly, and just after he had helped me to another plateful of
raspberries drowned in cream.

We shook hands, and in a few seconds we heard him starting his motor--or
rather, the Super-car that I conclude he had borrowed, or "wangled," or
whatever he calls it, from one of his many wealthy friends. Through the
window I caught a flashing glimpse of this hedge-sparrow-blue car with
her silver mascot whizzing past--on the road to Lewes.

This was odd, I thought.

For there was no doubt that when we pulled up at the inn, that car's
nose had been towards home, and London.

Then we, too, started off for Lewes, and the inquiries we had to make
there.

This was when I discovered that Mr. Jessop and I were, as I've said,
"shadowed."

Mr. Burke, in that gorgeous car of his, had evidently determined, for
some obscure reason, not to lose sight of us.

We overtook him, tooling leisurely along, a mile this side of Uckfield.

We waved; we caught a cheery gleam of his white teeth and black-lashed
blue eyes. I thought that would be the last of him. Oh, dear, no. A
quarter of a mile further on he appeared to the right by some
cross-road. And from then on he and the light-blue car kept appearing
and disappearing in our field of vision.

At one moment the light-blue and silver gleam of his motor would flash
through the midsummer green of trees overshadowing some lane ahead of
us. Again he would appear a little behind and to the left. Presently,
again, to the right....

"That friend of yours seems to know the country considerable well,"
remarked the American to me. "Looks like as if he was chasing
butterflies all over it. Is he a great Nature-lover, Miss Smith?"

"I couldn't tell you," I said vaguely, and feeling rather annoyed. "I
don't know this Mr. Burke at all well."

"Is that so?" said the young American gravely.

Near Lewes we lost sight of that glittering car; it seemed finally.

I felt thoroughly relieved at that. He was a most embarrassing sort of
travelling companion, the Honourable Jim!

                              CHAPTER XXIV

                          WE SEEK "THE REFUGE"

WE (Mr. Jessop and I) drove slowly to the first post-office.

There we both alighted. And I in my impatience fairly flung myself
against the long counter with its wirework screen that fenced off the
post-office girls.

They stared curiously at the anxious-looking young woman in black and
the grey-clad, unmistakably American young man, who both at once began
to make inquiries about a certain telegram which had been handed in
there at half-past seven o'clock the evening before.

"Are you the person to whom the telegram was addressed?" one of the
girls asked almost suspiciously.

"Yes. I am Miss Smith. You see! Here is an envelope addressed to me at
the Hotel Cecil," I said, feverishly producing that envelope (it
belonged to Mr. Brace's last note to me). "Can you tell me who handed in
this message?"

"I couldn't, I'm sure," said the girl who had spoken suspiciously. "I
was off last evening before six."

"Can you tell me who was here?" I demanded, fuming at the delay.

The girls seemed blissfully unaware that this was a matter of life and
death to me.

"Miss Carfax was here, I believe," volunteered one of the other girls,
in the "parcels" division of the long counter.

I asked eagerly: "Which is Miss Carfax, please?"

"Just gone to her lunch," the two girls replied at once. "Won't be back
until two o'clock."

"Oh, dear!" I fretted. Then a third girl spoke up.

"Let's have a look at that wire, dear, will you?" she said to the
parcels girl. "I think I remember Miss Carfax taking this in. Yes.
That's right. 'Why ever don't you send my clothes, Miss Million?' I
remember us passing the remark afterwards what an uncommon name
'Million' was."

"Oh, do you! How splendid!" I said, all eagerness at once. "Then you
remember the young lady who telegraphed?"

"Yes----"

"A small, rather stumpy young lady," I pursued. "Nice-looking, with
bright grey eyes and black hair? She was dressed in a cerise evening
frock with a----"

The post-office girl shook her head behind the wire screen.

"No; that wasn't the one."

"How stupid of me; no, of course, she wouldn't be still wearing the
evening frock," I amended hastily. "But she was dark-haired, and
short----"

Again the post-office girl shook her head.

"Shouldn't call her short," she said. "Taller than me."

"Dark, though," I insisted. "Black hair."

"Oh, no," said the post-office girl decidedly. "That wasn't her. Red
hair. Distinctly red."

"Are you sure," I said, in dismay, "that you haven't made a mistake?"

"Oh, no," said the post-office girl, still more decidedly. "I've seen
her about, often. I know the colour of her hair. You know, Daisy,"
turning to another of the girls, "that one from the 'Refuge.'"

"There's so many from the 'Refuge' come in here," said the maddening
girl she had called Daisy.

"Yes, but you know the one. Rather strikingly dressed always. Lots of
scent, makes herself up. Her with the hair. The one we call 'Autumn
Tints.'"

"'Autumn Tints'--oh, yes, I know her----"

"Yes, we know her," chorused the other girls, while I fidgeted,
crumpling Million's baffling wire in my hand. "That's the lady who sent
off the telegram. I couldn't be mistaken."

Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, at my side, interposed.

"Well, now, will you young ladies be so kind as to tell us where she
resides? The 'Refuge'--what'll that be?"

We had, it seemed, still some distance to go. We must take the road that
went so, then turn to the right, then to the left again. Then about a
mile further down we'd see a red brick house in a clump of trees, with a
big garden and green palings on to the road. It had "The Refuge" painted
up on a board nailed to a big oak tree in the garden. We shouldn't be
able to mistake it, said the girls.

"Certainly you won't mistake it if you see any of the 'Refugees' in the
garden when you come up," hazarded the most talkative of the post-office
girls.

"It's a case of 'Once seen, never to be forgotten,' there!"

As we went out of the office I found myself wondering more and more
anxiously what all this might mean. What sort of a place had Million got
herself into the middle of?

"What do you think it all means?" I turned again appealingly to the
young man who was driving me.

He shook his grey-hatted head. His face was rather graver than before.

Mercy! What were we going to find? What did he think? Evidently he
wasn't going to tell me.

Only when we got clear of the straggling outskirts of Lewes he crammed
on speed. Up the gradual hills we flew between the bare shoulders of the
downs where the men and horses working in the fields afar off looked as
small as mechanical toys. The whole country was gaunt and gigantic, and
a little frightening, to me. Perhaps this was because my nerves were
already utterly overstrained and anxious. I could see no beauty in the
wideswept Sussex landscape, with the little obsolete-looking villages
set down here and there, like a child's building of bricks, in the midst
of a huge carpet.

There seemed to me something uncanny and ominous in the tinkling of the
sheep-bells that the fresh breeze allowed to drift to our ears.

On we whizzed, and by what miracle we escaped police-traps I do not
know.... We took the turns of our directions, and at last I heard a
short, relieved sort of exclamation from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.

"Here we are. This'll be it, I guess." For here were the dark-green
towers of elms set back from the road. A red roof and old-fashioned
chimney-stacks showed among them. There was a garden in front, with tall
Mary-lilies and pink-and-white phlox and roses and carnations and thrift
that grew down to the palings.

And close up beside those palings there was drawn a pale-blue car that I
knew well--too well!

It was the car with the silver-winged Victory as mascot! The car in
which we'd been followed and shadowed for so much of our journey by the
Honourable Jim Burke.

He was here, then! He was before us!

What had he to do with the "Refuge"?

Sounds of singing greeted us as we left the car, pushed open the
green-palinged gate, and walked up the pebbled path between the
flower-beds of the garden. Some one behind the lilac bushes was singing,
in a very clear, touching voice, a snatch of the ballad: "Oh, ye'll tak'
the high road and I'll tak' the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before
ye...."

A turn in the garden path brought us full upon the singer. A wonderful
apparition indeed she was! As tall as any woman I had seen (excepting
the long-limbed cobra-lady), and the June sun shone on a head of hair
that was as bright as a bed of marigolds--red hair, but not all the same
kind of red. It was long and loose in the breeze, and it fell to the
singer's waist in a shower of red-gold, covering her face and hiding
most of her bodice, which appeared to be a sort of flimsy muslin
dressing-jacket. Her skirt was very makeshift and of brown holland. The
stockings she wore were white thread, and her shoes were just navy-blue
felt bedroom slippers, with jaeger turn-overs to them. In fact, her
whole appearance was négligée in the extreme. Who--what could she be?
She looked a cross between a mermaid and a scarecrow. She was holding
one hank of red-gold out against her arm, as a shop assistant measures
silk, and she crunched along the garden path, still singing in that
delicious voice: "But I and my true love will never meet again, on the
bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond!" Blinded by her hair and the stream
of sunlight, she nearly walked straight into us before she discovered
that there was any one there on the path at all.

"I beg your pardon," began Mr. Hiram P. Jessop with his usual
politeness. "Could you inform us----"

The singing mermaid gave a little "ow" of consternation, and tossed back
some of the hair from her face.

It was a disappointing sight, rather, for what we saw was a round,
full-mooney, rather foolish face, with a large pink mouth, but no other
definite features. The eyes were pale blue, the cheeks were paler pink,
and the eyebrows and eyelashes looked as if they had been washed away in
a shower of rain.

Altogether, a thoroughly weird apparition it was who stared at us, and
giggled, and said, in a very Cockney accent: "Oh, good Gollywog! another
man! There's no getting away from them in this place this morning. And
there was I thinking I had found a quiet spot to dry my hair in!"

"I am very sorry to intrude," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop in his most
courteous voice. "Could you inform me, Madam, if this is the house they
call The Refuge?"

"That's right," said the woman with the hair. And I found myself
suddenly wondering if she were the lady that those post-office girls had
nicknamed "Autumn Tints."

It was most appropriate, with those reds and golds and bronzes of the
hair that must have been sufficiently striking had it not been "treated"
with henna, as it had.

So I said eagerly, and without further preamble: "Oh, then, could you
tell me if Miss Million is here?"

"I couldn't, dear, really," said the woman, who looked all washed-out
excepting her hair. "There is such a lot of them that keep coming and
going here! Like a blessed beehive, isn't it? Bothered if I can keep
track of all their names!"

She paused a moment before she went on.

"Miss Million--now which would she be?"

I felt a chill of despair creeping over my heart.

What did she mean by saying that "so many of them" kept coming and going
in this place?

This, combined with the comments of those post-office girls at Lewes,
awoke in my mind one terrifying conclusion. This place with the peaceful
garden and the pretty name----! There was something uncanny about it....
This place was a lunatic asylum!

Yes, I did not see what else on earth it could possibly be! And then
this woman with the vacuous face and the wild hair, and still wilder
kind of attire, she, without doubt, was one of the patients!

What in the world was my poor little Million doing in this galley,
provided she was here at all?

And who brought her here? And what was the Honourable Jim's car doing
out there? Could he have been so disgraceful as to have got her brought
here for the purpose of rescuing her himself, and of earning her undying
gratitude as well as the riches of her uncle? Oh, what a horrible
trick....

Rather than that I felt that I would gladly see the money all go over to
Miss Million's cousin! That big young man stood there looking as puzzled
as I did, glancing doubtfully, almost apprehensively, at the woman with
the wild attire.

I attacked her again, with more firmness this time.

"I think Miss Million must be here," I said. "She sent me a telegram,
and they told me at the post-office place that it was----"

"Oh! her that sent the telegram, was it? That's the young lady you want?
I know, I took the telegram myself," said the woman with the
autumn-foliage hair. "It was a girl who turned up here with nothing but
an evening gown and a light coat the day before yesterday; a dark girl,
short."

"That would be the one," I cried with the utmost eagerness. "Is
she----Oh, is she still here?"

"She's here, all right," said the woman with the hair. "My word! She
wasn't half in a paddy, I can tell you, because she could not get her
maid or whoever it was to send down her things from London. Nothing but
what she stood up in, and having to borrow, and no one with a thing to
fit her! She is here, all right!" Relieved, but not completely relieved
until I should have heard more of Million's adventures, I said: "I am
her maid. I have brought down her things. Would you be so kind as to
tell me where I should find Miss Million?"

"She will be in the house, having her dinner now," said the poor
red-haired lunatic quite kindly. "You will excuse me coming in with you
myself, dear, won't you? There is a strange gentleman in there come in
that other car, and I have not had time to go and get myself dressed
yet. I made sure I should have all the morning to myself to get my hair
done. Such a time it does take me," she added, shaking it out with an
air of vanity, and, indeed, she had something to be vain of. "It isn't
everybody I like to see me like this. I am never one to be careless
about my appearance when there are gentlemen about. They never think any
more of a girl" (poor creature, she was at least forty) "for things of
that kind. I am sure I had no more idea that there was another gentleman
coming in, and me with my hair like this! Of course, as I always say,
well! it's my own hair! Not like some girls that have to have a haystack
on their heads before they're fit to look at, as well as a switch all
round...."

It really seemed as if she was going on with this "mildly mental"
chatter for as long as we chose to listen.

So I gave one glance at Miss Million's cousin, meaning, "Shall we go?"
He nodded gravely back at me. Then, leaving the red-haired lunatic on
the path, shaking her tresses in the sun, we went on between the lilac
bushes with their undergrowth of lilies and stocks and pinks until we
came to the house.

The house was a regular Sussex farm sort of looking place that had
evidently been turned into a more modern dwelling-house place. There
were bright red curtains at all the white-sashed windows, which were
wide open. There were window-boxes with lobelia and canary-creeper and
geraniums. As I say, all the windows were flung wide open, and from out
of them I heard issuing such a babble of mixed noises as I don't think I
had ever heard since I was last in the parrot-house at the Zoo. There
were shrill voices talking; there was clattering of knives and forks
against crockery. These sounds alternated with such bursts of
unrestrained laughter that now I was perfectly certain that my suspicion
outside in the garden had been a correct one. Yes! This place could be
nothing but some institution for the mentally afflicted.

And this--and this was where Million had been spirited off to!

Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave
face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big
open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned
by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on
the left of us.

"They can't hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop's very
appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly
ladies I shan't be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the
porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"

  This I did.

I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of
laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch
through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I
knew--the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.

"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and
my annoyance at the very thought of that man nerved me to knock really
peremptorily on the sturdy panels of the door.

Then at last I got an answer.

"Don't stand knocking there like an idiot, come in," shrieked the
highest-pitched of all the parrot voices. Giving myself a mental shake,
in I went.

I found myself in a big brown distempered room, with a long white table
running down the centre of it. The place seemed full to overflowing with
two elements--one, the overpowering smell of dinner, i. e., pork and
greens and boiled potatoes, and stout; two, a crowd of girls and women
who looked to me absolutely numberless. They were all more or less
pretty, these girlish faces. And they were all turned to me with
wide-open eyes and parted lips. Out of this sea of faces there appeared
to be just two that I recognised as I gazed round. One was the laughing,
devil-may-care face of the Honourable Jim, who sat with a long peg glass
in front of him, at the bottom of the table.

                              CHAPTER XXV

                                 FOUND!

  THE other----

Ah, yes! At last, at last! After all my anxiety and worry and fretting
and search! There she was! I could have kissed the small, animated
grey-eyed face of the girl who was sitting next to the Honourable Jim at
the table. However she'd come there, I had at least found her.

My long-lost mistress; Miss Million herself!

"Oh, it's her!" cried Miss Million's shrill Cockney voice in a sudden
cessation of the parrot-like shrieks of talk and laughter as I ran round
the table. "Oh, it's my Miss--it's my Miss Smith!"

She clapped her hands with impatience, jumping up in her chair.

"Have you brought them, Smith?" she demanded eagerly. "Have you got my
clothes----"

"Oh, 'ark at her!" shrieked some one on the right of the table. "It's
all her clothes! Hasn't thought of anything else since she came
down----"

"Better late than never----" The babble went on all around me, while I
strove to make myself heard.

"Now we shall see a bit o' style----"

"Don't see anything wrong with the blouse the girl's got on, myself----"

"Fits where it touches, doesn't it----"

Indeed, the garment in which my young mistress's small form was
enfolded appeared to be the sort of wrap which a hairdresser's assistant
tucks about one when one is going to have a shampoo!

"Looks like a purser's jacket on a marling-spike!" sang out some one
else; and then more laughter.

Well, if they were lunatics, they were at least the cheerful variety!

I went up to Miss Million's chair, ignoring the blue glance of the man
beside her, and said in my "professional," respectful murmur: "I have
brought your dressing-bag and a suit-case, Miss----"

"Why ever didn't you bring them down yesterday?" demanded Million, all
eyes and shrill Cockney accent.

"I didn't know, Miss, where I was to bring them," I replied, feeling the
amused gaze of the Honourable Jim upon me as I said it.

"But, bless me! I gave the full address," vociferated Miss Million, "in
that telegram!"

All the lunatics (or whatever they were) were also listening with
manifest enjoyment.

"There was no address, Miss," I said, as I handed her the wire, which I
still kept in my hand.

"Yes! But this was the second one I sent!" protested my mistress loudly.
"This was when I was at my wit's end and couldn't think why you didn't
come! I sent off that first one first thing in the morning; you ought to
have got it!"

  "I never did, Miss," I began.

Then a robust, rollicking voice that I confusedly remembered broke in on
the discussion.

"There you are, you see! What do I always say? Never trust anything
except your lookin'-glass, and not that except it's in a cross light,"
cried the voice gaily. "Certainly don't trust anything with trousers on!
Not even if they are ragged ones and tied up with lumps of string! Not
even if they do pitch you a tale about having served in the Boer War!"

Still feeling as if I were in a weird dream, I turned towards the
direction of the voice that enunciated these puzzling sentiments.

  It proceeded from----

  Ah! I knew her, too!

I knew the brass-bright hair and the plump white-clad, sulphur-crested,
cockatoo-like form across the table.

"London's Love," again! Miss Vi Vassity herself! I'd seen her last where
I last saw Million--at that supper-table.... Now what in the world was
England's premier comedienne doing in this asylum--if an asylum it were?

She went on in her high swift voice. "You won't catch me giving
half-crowns to any more tramps to hand in a wire at the next
post-office! No! Not if they can sport a row of medals on their chests
from here to East Grinstead! I knew how it would be," declared Miss Vi
Vassity. "My kind heart's my downfall, but I'm going to sign the pledge
to reform that. And you, my dear----"--to me--

"You sit down and have a bite of something to eat with us. Your mistress
don't mind. You don't mind, Nellie, do you?"--this to Miss Million.

"We all mess together in this place. I couldn't be worried with a
servant's hall. Make room for her there, Irene, will you? The girl looks
scared to death; it's all right, Miss--Smith, aren't you? Sit down,
child, sit down----"

Before I could say another word I found that a wooden chair had been
pushed squeakingly under me by some one. Knives and forks had been
clattered down in front of me by some one else. And there was I, sitting
almost in the lap of a very tiny, dark-eyed, gipsy-looking girl, in a
blouse without a collar and a pink linen sun hat pulled well down over
her small face.

On the other side of me, a big, lazy-looking blonde in a sky-blue sports
coat rocked her own chair a little away from mine, and said, in a
drowsy, friendly sort of voice: "Drop of ale, dear? Or d'you take a
glasser stout?"

Then the flood tide of talk and laughter seemed to flow on over my head
so fast that I literally could not make myself heard. I expostulated
that I had already had lunch, and that I didn't want anything to drink,
thanks, and that a gentleman was waiting outside on the step--but it
passed unheeded until my hostess caught my eye.

"What's that, what's that?" ejaculated Miss Vi Vassity, preening her
white-linen-bedecked bust across the table, as she saw me trying vainly
to say something against the uproar. "What's all that disturbance in the
dress circle, Bella?" The honey-blonde whom she called Bella turned to
me and said: "Speak up, dear; no one can hear your lines!" Then she made
a trumpet of her plump white hands and bellowed across to Miss Vi
Vassity:

"Says she's got her best boy with her, and that he is having to wait
outside on the steps!"

Here there was another general gale of laughter, in which my
crimson-cheeked explanations were quite lost! In the middle of it all I
saw the Honourable Jim rise from his seat, and stride into the hall and
bring in Mr. Jessop. He appeared to be introducing him to London's Love.
Miss Vi Vassity immediately made the new-comer sit down also, close to
her at the top of the table.

I have said it was a rather strange lunch that we had had earlier in the
morning at the little honeysuckle-covered inn, where we three had taken
cider and bread and cheese together. But it was nothing to the
extraordinary unexpectedness, yes, the weirdness in every way of this
second lunch, at the long table lined with all those strange types.

Already, as I sat down, I had given up the idea that it was a female
lunatic asylum and rest cure combined. But what was it, this "Refuge"?

I simply couldn't think! And I did not find out until quite a long time
afterwards. After dinner was finished, when Million, I knew, was fuming
for her boxes, she beckoned me to follow her away from the noisy crowd
of girls, up the shallow, broad, old-fashioned staircase. There was one
door on the landing which she tiptoed past, putting her finger on her
lips.

  More mystery!

I could hardly wait with my questions until the door was shut of the
little, slanting-ceiling room with the snow-white, dimity-covered bed
that represented Miss Million's new quarters.

There were straw mats on the bare boards. On the little chest of drawers
there was a Jubilee mug full of the homeliest cottage flowers. This was
a far cry from London and the Hotel Cecil!

I turned with eagerness to my mistress. She had flung herself upon the
suit-case that had now been brought up to her room. She had forgotten to
wait until I should unpack for her, and, having snatched the keys from
me, she began fishing out her blouses and other possessions with "Ah's"
of delight and recognition.

"What on earth is this place, and what's the meaning of it all?" I
began. But Miss Million laughed gleefully, evidently taking no small
delight in my mystification. "Lively, isn't it?" she said. "Talk about
the old orphanage! Well, us girls used to enjoy life there, but it was a
fool to this. I fair revel in it, I can tell you, Smith, and be bothered
to the old Cecil. I don't see why we shouldn't stop on here. Middle-day
dinner and all. That's just my mark, and we can wire to that other
place. Here's plenty good enough for me, for the present----"

"But, look here," I began. "I want to know----" My mistress took me up
quickly. I hadn't seen her in such bubbling high spirits since some of
the old kitchen-days at Putney. "It's me that 'wants to know,' and I'm
just going to begin asking questions about it," she declared, as she
jumped up to allow me to fasten her into the skirt of the
tobacco-brown taffeta.

"Look here, for a start! Who's that nice-lookin' young fellow you came
down with? I never! Motorin' all over the country with strange young
gentlemen. My word! there's behaviour!" giggled Million, evidently with
the delightful consciousness that her own behaviour was far more
reprehensible than mine could ever be. "Bringin' him in, as bold as
brass; whatever do you think your Auntie'd say to that, Miss--there! I
nearly called you Miss Beatrice again. After all this time! Thinkin' of
your Aunt Nasturtium, I suppose? But straight ... Smith! Where did you
pick up that young man?"

"Pick him up? I didn't," I began, feeling that a long explanation was
ahead of me. "As a matter of fact, he picked me up----"

"Oh, shockin'," said Million, giggling more than before. "Whoever said I
was going to allow you to have followers?"

  This annoyed me.

"Followers!" I exclaimed quite violently.

It really was exasperating. First the Honourable Jim! Then the girl
called "Bella"! Then my mistress! They were all taking it for granted!
They were all foisting him upon me, this young American with the sleek,
mouse-coloured hair and the upholstered shoulders! Upon me!

"His name is Mr. Hiram P. Jessop----"

"'Tain't pretty, but what's in a name?" said Million, as she held out
her wrist for me to insert the microscopic pearl buttons into the
fairy-silk loops that fastened her cuffs. "Who is he?"

  "He's your cousin," I told her.

And, of course, as I expected, it was some time before I was able to get
my young mistress to believe this.

"You're sure," she said at last, "that he's not having us on?"

"I don't think so," I said rather sadly, for I thought again of what
that cousinship might mean--the loss of all Miss Million's fortune!
However, I'd leave that aspect of it for the present. Let him explain
that. They hadn't been introduced yet.

I said: "He's extremely anxious to meet you, let me tell you. He thought
of nothing else all the time that he was talking to me. Be as nice to
him as you can, won't you?"

"Well, I don't see why I should go out of my way," demurred Million
exasperatingly. I had hoped that she might appeal to the chivalrous side
of the young American's nature; appeal to it so that he might give up
his idea of fighting for his rights--if they are his rights! But if
Million is going to put her back up and become independent--well,
they'll fight. And there'll be a catastrophe, and the downfall of
Million's prosperity, and general wretchedness for Miss Million and her
maid--oh, dear, what a prospect!

  I began to coax her.

"Oh, yes, be nice. He's rather a dear, this cousin of yours. And he was
so absurdly pleased, do you know, to hear that you had black hair. He
admires brunettes."

"Very kind of him," said Million quite flippantly. "You told him, I
suppose, about me bein' dark."

"He asked so many questions!" I said. "He really takes such an interest.
You ought to be flattered, Miss Million."

"I don't know that having interest taken in me by young gentlemen is any
such a rarity, just now!"

Here she reddened rather prettily.

I fastened the other cuff. Million went on, in a gush of artless
confidence: "To tell you the truth, Smith, I haven't half been getting
off lately. The other night, at the Thousand and One Club, who d'you
suppose was making a fuss of me? A lord, my girl!"

This she said, little dreaming that her maid had watched the whole of
this scene.

"And then, there's something else that's getting a bit more serious,"
said Million, bridling. "Turning up to-day, just because he'd guessed
where I'd got to, and all!"

"He? Which he?" I asked, with a quick feeling of dismay.

"It's what I call pointed," said Million, "the way he's been going on
ever since he's met me. Even if he is uncle's old friend, it's not all
on account of uncle that he makes hisself so agreeable. Oh, no! Marked,
that's what I call it. You know who I mean."

She nodded her dark head. She smiled as she spoke the name with a
shyness that suited her rather well.

"The Honourable Mr. Burke!"

"Million!" I said anxiously, as I folded the borrowed blouse I'd taken
off her, "Miss Million, do you like him?"

Miss Million's grey eyes sparkled. She said: "Who wouldn't like him?"

A pang seized me. A pang of the old apprehension that my little heiress
of a mistress might lose her heart to a graceless fortune-hunter!

I said, with real anxiety in my tone: "Oh, my dear, you don't think you
are going to fall in love with this Mr. Burke, do you?"

                              CHAPTER XXVI

                          MISS MILLION IN LOVE

AT last I have been allowed to get to the bottom of what this
extraordinary place, the "Refuge," really is!

It is no more a lunatic asylum, of course, than it is a nunnery.

It started life by being a big Sussex farmhouse.

Then some truly enterprising person took it on as a lodging-house for
summer visitors, also for a tea-garden for motorists.

Then it happened that England's premier comedienne, Miss Vi Vassity, who
was motoring through on her way from a week-end at Brighton, saw the
place. She fell in love with it as the fulfilment of one of her dreams.

It appeared that she has always wanted to set up a lodging-house for
hard-up theatrical girls who are what they call "resting," that is, out
of a job for the moment.

I have picked up from Million and from the others that London's Love has
the kindest heart in all London for those members of her profession who
have been less successful than she has. She has a hundred pensioners;
she is simply besieged with begging-letters. It is a wonder that there
is any of her own salary left for this bright-haired, sharp-tongued
artiste to live on!

Well, to cut a long story short, she bought the place. Here it is,
crammed full of stage girls and women of one sort and another, mostly
from the music-halls. The woman with the hair is Miss Alethea Ashton,
the "serio." The honey-blonde in the dressing-jacket, who sat at one
side of me at dinner, is "Marmora, the Twentieth Century Hebe," who
renders classic poses or "breathing marbles."

The tiny, gipsy-looking one on my other side is Miss Verry Verry, the
boy impersonator, who appears in man-o'-war suits and sailor hats. There
is a snake-charmer lady and a ventriloquist's assistant, and I have not
yet been able to discover who all the others were.

Miss Vi Vassity lets those pay her who can. The others owe "until their
ship comes in"; but the mistress of the place keeps a shrewd though
kindly eye on all their doings, and she comes down at least once a week
herself to make sure that all is well with "Refuge" and "Refugettes."

The secret of her sudden pilgrimage into Sussex the other night was that
she had received a telephone message at the club of The Thousand and One
Nights to inform her of still another arrival at the "Refuge." This was
the infant daughter of the ventriloquist's assistant, who is also the
ventriloquist's wife. This event seems to have come off some weeks
before it was expected. And at the time the "Refuge" was short of
domestic service; there was no one to wait on the nurse who had been
hastily summoned. The house was at sixes and sevens....

In a fever of hurry Miss Vi Vassity went down, taking with her a
volunteer who said she loved little babies and would do anything to "be
a bit of a help" in the house.

This volunteer was the little heiress, who still kept, under all her new
and silken splendour, the heart of the good-natured, helpful "little
Million" from the Soldiers' Orphanage and the Putney kitchen.

I might have spared myself all my nervous anxiety about Lord
Fourcastles! It seems a bad dream now.

She had motored off then and there with the head of the "Refuge,"
without even waiting to wire from town. Only when they neared their
destination had she thought of sending off a message to me, with the
address where I was to follow her. That message had probably been tossed
into the hedgerow by the tramp to whom it had been hastily entrusted.

Hence my anxiety and suspense, which Miss Million declared had been
nothing compared to her own!

Of course, people who have given terrible frights to their friends
always insist upon it that it is they who have been the frightened ones!

But all this, of course, was what I picked up by degrees, and in
incoherent patches, later on.

Many things had happened before I really got to the rights of the story.
One scene after another has been flicked on to the screen of my
experiences ... but to take things in order.

Perhaps I had better go back to where I was unpacking Million's things
in the transformed farmhouse bedroom, and where I was confronted with a
fresh anxiety.

Namely, that the wealthy and ingenuous and inexperienced Million really
had fallen in love with that handsome ne'er-do-weel, Mr. James Burke.

"Have you?" I persisted. "Have you?"

Million gave a little admitting sigh. She sat there on the edge of the
dimity bed, and watched me shake out that detested evening frock in
which she had motored down.

She has got it so crumpled that I shall make it the excuse never to let
her wear it again.

"The Honourable Mr. Burke," said Million, with a far-away look in her
eyes, "is about the handsomest gentleman that I have ever seen."

"I daresay," I said quite severely. "Certainly there is no denying the
Honourable Jim's good looks. Part of his stock-in-trade! But you know,
Miss Million"--here I brought out the eternal copy-book maxim--"Handsome
is as handsome does!"

Hereupon Million voiced the sentiment that I had always cherished myself
concerning that old proverb.

"It may be true. But then, it always seems to me, somehow, as if it was
neither here nor there!"

I didn't know what to say. It seemed so very evident that Million had
set her innocent and affectionate heart on a young man who was
good-looking enough in his Celtic, sooty-haired, corn-cockle, blue-eyed
way, but who really had nothing else to recommend him. Everything to be
said against him, in fact. Insincere, unscrupulous, cynical, unreliable;
everything that's bad, bad, BAD!

"You can't say he isn't a gentleman, now," put in Million again, with a
defiant shake of her little dark head. "That you can't say."

"Well, I don't know. It depends," I said, in a very sermonising voice.
"It all depends upon what you call 'a gentleman.'"

"No, it doesn't," contradicted Miss Million unexpectedly. "You know
yourself it doesn't depend upon 'what you call' anything. Either he is,
or he isn't. That Auntie of yours would ha' told you that. And stuck-up
and stand-offish and a perfect terror as she was, she'd have been the
first to admit that the Honourable Mr. Burke was one of her own sort!"

I couldn't help smiling a little. Million had hit it. This would have
been exactly Aunt Anastasia's attitude!

"And don't you remember what my great wish always was? Whenever there
was a new moon, or anything," Million reminded me, "you used to want
money and nice clothes. But there was something I wanted--quite
different. I wanted to marry a gentleman. I--I still want it!"

Her underlip quivered as she gazed out of the lattice-window at the
peaceful bare Sussex landscape. Her grey eyes were full of tears and of
dreams. As for me, I felt half-sorrowful for her, half-furious with the
Hon. Jim; the person whom nobody but a perfect innocent, like Million,
would dream of liking or taking seriously!... Reprobate! He ought to be
horsewhipped!

I remembered his whimsical horror in that tea-shop when he had exclaimed
to me: "Marry her? Marry a girl with hands like that, or a voice like
that?" Yet he had made "a girl with a voice like that" dreamily in love
with him. Really my heart swelled quite passionately with resentment
against him.

I wondered how far he had been trifling with her honest heart, both
yesterday night at the Thousand and One Club, and this morning at lunch
at the "Refuge." He was quite capable of doing one of two despicable
things. Either of flirting desperately and then riding away; or, of
marrying her in spite of what he had said, and then neglecting
everything about her but her income! Which was he going to do, I
wondered.

"Million! Miss Million," I said hastily. "Do you mind telling me if Mr.
Burke has proposed to you?"

Million looked down, showing the dark half-moons of her eyelashes on her
cheeks in a way that I knew she had copied from one of the "Cellandine
Novelettes" which used to be her favourite reading in Putney. She heaved
a deep sigh. And then she said: "Well! Between you and I, he hasn't
spoken yet."

"Yet? Do you mean--do you think he is going to?" I said sharply.

A smile grew over Million's small and bonny face. I must say I think she
grows better-looking every day. Why should the Honourable Jim have made
that unkind remark about her hands? Her face is prettier, probably, than
those of half the wealthy girls he meets. Especially when she dimples
like that.

She said demurely: "Do you know, I don't think any one can expect any
one not to notice when any one is getting really fond of any one!"

This involved sentence meant, I knew, the worst.

It meant that she thought the Honourable Jim was going to ask her to
marry him! And she must have some good reason for thinking so! Or he's
an incorrigible flirt, one of the two!

"If he does ask you to marry him," I pursued, feeling as if I were a
mixture of a schoolmistress and Million's own mother combined, "do you
think you are going to say yes you will?"

"Do I think?" echoed Million ardently. "I don't 'think' anything about
it. I just know I will!"

Oh, dear! Ever since I have been Miss Million's maid I have seemed to
get from one difficulty into another. It is worse than ever now that I
know for certain that the poor little thing imagines she is going to
marry Mr. Burke. She won't ever be happy, even if he does marry her for
her money.

But, stop! There is another thing. Her money?

Supposing her money does go? Well, then, the handsome Irishman will jilt
her quite mercilessly. I know enough about him to know that! And I have
a horrible presentiment that this is exactly what is going to happen.
That shrewd-eyed young American downstairs, Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, will
bring an action to recover for himself all Miss Million's dollars. He
will walk off with the fortune. And my mistress, poor little creature,
will be left without either money or love!

As for me, I shall lose my place. I, too, shan't know what to
do--unless----

Oh, yes. There is always one thing I can do. I shall marry. There is the
proposal of Mr. Reginald Brace, who begged me to say yes to him when he
gets back from Paris.

Thinking over it, I am pretty sure that that is what I shall say.

Really it will be a rest to turn to something as simple and
straightforward as Mr. Reginald Brace after all the complications with
which my life has been beset up till now. So that disposes of me,
Beatrice Lovelace. But what about Nellie Million?

All these reflections passed through my mind in Million's bedroom at the
"Refuge," all the time I was putting the finishing touches to her before
she went down to meet her cousin (and incidentally the man who was going
to rob her of her fortune), Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.

Well, she looked bonny enough to make him feel some compunction about
it, that I would say! The brown taffeta skirt and the new blouse, the
leaf-brown suède shoes and the silk stockings that I had brought down
with me, all suited her admirably.

And besides being becomingly dressed, there was something still more
potently attractive about Million's appearance.

It was that flush and glow and sparkle, that aura that seems to cling
about a woman in love. I had heard before that there is no beauty
culture in the world that can give a woman just that look and that it is
absolutely the most unfailing beautifier. Now I saw with my own dismayed
eyes that it was but too true.

Nellie Million, ex-maid-of-all-work, had fallen in love with Lord
Ballyneck's graceless younger son. The result, so far, was to improve
her looks as much as my hairdressing and the Bond Street shopping for
her had done already.

She was impatient to go down. This, I knew, was not on the new cousin's
account. Poor child, she wanted to rejoin the Honourable Jim!

"But you've got to come with me, Smith, you know," she said, as she
reached the door. "Yes, you have. You have got to introduce me, and be
bothered to your only being my lady's-maid! There isn't much of that
sort of thing at the 'Refuge,' as I can tell you. See how nice and
homely Vi Vassity was about having you sit down with all of us at
dinner?"

I suppressed a smile at the idea of this condescension.

"Besides, he seems to know you pretty well, does my cousin," said little
Miss Million. "And I tell you, Smith, you may be very useful. Talking to
him and keeping him out of the way when Mr. Burke might want to be
having a few words with me, do you see?"

I saw, and my heart sank with dismay. There were fearful complications
ahead. I saw myself later on with Miss Million sobbing over a world that
had crashed into disillusionment just as one of my Aunt Anastasia's
priceless Nankin bowls had once come to pieces in her hand!

Still, I thought, I had better go down and see with my own eyes as much
of the tragedy as it was possible. I thought that the first act of it
might be even rather humorous. Both these young men trying to talk to
Million at once, and Million herself giving all her attention to the
young man who was the least good to her!

We came down into the sitting-room of the "Refuge." It seemed furnished
chiefly with wicker chairs, and brilliant houseboat cushions and very
stagey-looking photographs with huge autographs, put at right angles to
everything else. When we came down to this retreat we found that it was
occupied only by Miss Vi Vassity, leaning back very comfortably in a
deck-chair, and blowing smoke rings from the cigarette that was fastened
into a tiny silver holder, while opposite to her there was seated,
looking very conscientious and gravely interested, my mistress's
American cousin, Mr. Hiram P. Jessop himself.

"Why, where is Mr. Burke got to?" said Million, with a note of
unmistakable disappointment in her voice.

I knew that the poor little thing had been overwhelmingly anxious to
show herself off once more befittingly dressed before the blue,
black-lashed eyes that had last beheld her in somebody else's far too
voluminous garments. "I thought he was still with you, Vi?"

Miss Vi Vassity gave a shrewd, amused laugh.

"Not here, not here, my child!" she quoted lazily. "Our friend Jim said
he had got to push on up to London. He left plenty of messages and kind
loves and so forth for you. And you needn't go bursting yourself with
anxiety that he won't be turning up here again before we are any of us
much older or younger (seeing the jobs some of us have got to keep off
the enemy). He'll be down again presently all right. However, one off,
another on. Here is a new boy for you to play with, Nellie. Says he's a
cousin of yours," with a wave of her cigarette towards Mr. Jessop, who
had now risen to his very Americanly booted feet. "I believe it's true,
too," rattled on Miss Vassity. "He looks to me altogether too wide awake
to work off an old wheeze like 'cousins' if it were not a true one.
Well, cheery-oh, children. I am just off to see if poor Maudie upstairs
has had her gruel. I will leave you to fall into each other's arms. Come
along, Miss Smith. I daresay I can get that nurse to let you have a look
at the new little nipper if you are keen."

I had been standing all this time, of course, examining the photographs
inscribed "Yours to a cinder, Archie," and "To darling Vi, from her
faithful old pal, Gertie."

Now I moved quickly towards the door which Miss Vi Vassity had swung
open.

But my mistress, with a quick little movement, stopped me. "Smith, don't
you go. Vi, I don't want her to go," she protested. "She can pop up and
see that baby afterwards, when it is being bathed. I want her now to
stop and talk to this Mr. Jessop with me. I shan't feel so nervous
then," she added, with her little giggle.

"Please yourselves," said "London's Love," with a laugh and a little nod
for her exit. We three were left alone in the sitting-room.

I really think it is wonderful the way Americans will burst at once into
a flood of friendliness that it will take the average young Englishman
at least three or four years of intimate acquaintance to achieve.

And even then I doubt whether the average young Englishman (take, for
example, my prospective fiancé, Mr. Reginald Brace) would ever be able
to "let himself go" like they do! Never had I heard such a stream of
earnestly spoken compliments, accompanied by glances of such
unmistakable admiration, as young Mr. Jessop immediately proceeded to
lavish on Miss Million.

He told her, if I can remember correctly the sequence of his remarks:
"That he was real delighted to make her acquaintance; that he had
somehow fixed it up in his mind already that she would be a real, sweet
little girl when he got to know her, and that even he hadn't calculated
what a little Beaut she was going to turn out----"

"Oh, listen to him! If it isn't another of them!" exclaimed the artless
Million, all blushes and smiles as she turned to me; I felt as if I were
a referee in some game of which I wasn't quite certain about the rules.

Mr. Jessop went on to inform his cousin that she had the real, English,
peach-bloom complexion that was so much admired in the States; only that
she did her hair so much better than the way most English girls seemed
to fix theirs.

Here I nearly dropped a little curtsey. The arrangement of Million's
dark, glossy hair stands to my credit!

"There's a style about your dressing that I like, too. So real simple
and girlish," approved Mr. Jessop, with his eyes on the faultlessly cut,
tobacco-brown taffeta that had cost at least four times as much as the
elaborately thought-out crime in cerise which should have been on
Million's conscience. "I must say you take my breath away with your
pretty looks, Cousin Nellie; you do, indeed. If I may say so, you appear
to be the sort of little girl that any one might be thankful to have to
cherish as the regular little queen of the home."

Hereupon Million glowed as pink as any of the roses that were spreading
their sweetness abroad on the warm afternoon air outside the gaily
curtained window.

"Doesn't that sound lovely!" she exclaimed.

There was a wistfulness in her voice. I was afraid I knew only too well
what that wistfulness portended if I could read Million at all (and I
really think I ought to be able to now). That wistfulness meant "How
much lovelier it would be if the Honourable Jim Burke had been the one
to pay me that compliment about being the queen of the home!"

Then she added to the young American, whose boyish eyes were fixed
unflinchingly upon her: "Do you know, I am afraid you are an awful
flatterer and deceiver. You are just trying to see how much I am going
to take in about you thinking me nice-looking and all that!"

If she could only have had these misgivings about Mr. Burke himself,
instead of their being about the cousin who, I think, says very little
that he does not really mean! Always the wrong people get credit for
insincerity! "I am not a flatterer, believe me," said Mr. Hiram P.
Jessop. "If you think that I don't mean anything I say nice to you, why!
I am going to be very sad. I would like to have only nice things to say
to you," he added regretfully, "and I tell you it is coming real hard
on me--harder than I thought it would be, to have to say the difficult
things I have gotten to say now, Cousin Nellie."

So now he was coming to the business end of the interview! The part
where he meant to tell Million that her appreciative and gallant cousin
was possibly going to walk off with that fortune of hers!

I rose from my chair. I said respectfully: "Shall I go, Miss, if Mr.
Jessop is going to talk family affairs?"

                             CHAPTER XXVII

                       AN UNUSUAL SORT OF BEGGAR

"I GUESS it's not any different 'business' from what I have told you,
coming along in the car, Miss Smith," said the young American simply.
"Don't quit on my account."

"No, nor on mine neither," said Miss Million, turning quite anxiously to
me. "You stop on and hear the end of this, so that me and you can talk
it over like, later.

"Now, then," turning to her cousin again, "what's it all about?"

"To cut a long story short," said the young American, in that earnest
way of his that is really rather lovable. "You see before you, Cousin
Nellie, a man who is"--he paused impressively before he brought out half
a dozen pregnant words--"very badly in want of money!"

"Gracious! I must say I should not have thought it," ejaculated Million,
with a note of the native shrewdness which I had suspected her of having
left behind in our Putney kitchen. "If you are poor"--here her bright
grey eyes travelled up her cousin's appearance from his quite
new-looking American shoes to his well-kept thick and glossy hair--"if
you are poor, all I can say is your looks don't pity you!"

"I need not point out to you that looks are a very poor proposition to
go by when you are starting in on summing up a person's status," said
the young American easily. "I may not look it, but money is a thing that
I am desperate for."

A sequence of emotions passed each other over Million's little face. As
I watched there were disbelief, impatience, helplessness, and the first
symptoms of yielding. She said: "Well, I don't know how it is that since
I have come into uncle's money I have been meeting people one after the
other who keep offering to show me what to do with it. You know, Smith,"
turning to me. "Haven't I had a fair bushel of begging letters from one
person and another who is in need of cash? Some of them was real enough
to draw tears from the eyes of a stone! Do you remember that one, Smith,
about the poor woman with the two babies, and the operation, and I don't
know what all? Well! She dried up quick since I suggested calling round
to see the babies! A fine take-in that was, I expect"--this to me, with
her eye on the well-set-up young man sitting before her. "Still"--this
was where the yielding began to come in--"you are my cousin, when all is
said. And so, I suppose, I have got to remember that blood is thicker
than water, and----"

  She turned to me.

"Did you bring my cheque-book down, Smith, in my dressing-bag?"

"Yes, Miss, I did," I said gravely enough, though I was laughing
ruefully within myself.

"Well, just pop upstairs and get it for me," said Miss Million. Then,
again turning to her cousin, she said: "I can't say that I myself would
have cared particularly to start borrowing money off some one the first
time I set eyes on them, cousin or no cousin! Unusual sort of begging I
call it! Still, I daresay I could spare you" (here I saw her making a
rapid mental calculation) "five pounds, if that is of any good to you."

Here, at the very door, I stopped. I had been checked by the hearty
laugh of real boyish amusement that broke from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop at
her last words.

"Five pounds!" he echoed in his crisp, un-English accent. "Five? Any
good to me? My dear cousin Nellie, that's no more good to me than a
tissue-paper sunshade would be under a waterspout. No, five pounds would
be most emphatically not any good to me. Nor ten pounds. Nor twenty
pounds. I am not asking for a day's carfare and luncheon ticket. I tell
you, my dear little girl, it is _money_ I want!"

Miss Million stared at him rather indignantly this time. I didn't dream
of leaving her at this juncture.

I waited and I watched, without troubling to conceal my interest from
these two young people. I felt I had to listen to what would happen
next.

"Money?" repeated Miss Million, the heiress. "However much do you want,
then?"

"Thousands of dollars," announced the young American in his grave, sober
voice.

There came into the bright grey eyes of Miss Nellie Million an angry
look that I had once seen there when an unwise milk-boy had tried to
convince our thrifty little maid-of-all-work that he had given her
sixpennyworth instead of the bare threepennyworth that filled the
little cardboard vessel which she held in her hand! For I believe that
at the bottom of her heart "little Million" is still as thrifty, still
as careful, still as determined that she won't be "done"!

In the matter of clothes she has, of course, allowed herself for once to
loose her firmly screwed-on little dark head.

But now that the trousseau of new clothes is bought the brief madness
had left her. She is again the same Million who once said to me at home:
"Extravagant! That is a thing I could never be!"

In a voice of the old Million she demanded sharply of the quite
prosperous-looking, well-dressed and well-fed young man in front of her:
"Whatever in the wide world would you do with all that money, supposing
you had it?"

"Well, I should not waste it, I guess," retorted the young man. "In
fact, it would be put to a considerably bigger purpose than what it
would if you had kept it, to buy yourself candies and hair-ribbon and
whatever you girls do with money when it gets into your little hands. I
want that money," here his voice grew more serious than before, "for an
Object!"

"I want that money for an object," repeated Miss Million's American
cousin. And then he went on, at last, to tell us what "the object" was.

It took a long time. It was very complicated. It was full of technical
terms that were absolute Greek to me, as well as to Million. There she
sat in the big basket-chair, with the coloured cushions behind her dark
head; her grey eyes wide open, and fixed, defensively, upon the face of
this young man with a story to tell.

To cut it short, it was this. About a year ago Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had
left off being manager of the pork factory belonging to the late Samuel
Million because of his other work. He was, he said, "no factory boss by
nature." He was an inventor. He had invented a machine--yes! This was
where the technical terms began raining thick and fast upon our
bewildered ears--a machine for dropping bombs from aeroplanes----

"Bombs? Good heavens alive!" interrupted Miss Million, with a look of
real horror on her little face. "D'you mean them things that go off?"

"Why, I guess I hope they'd go off," returned the young man with the
shrewd and courteous smile. "Certainly that would be the idea of
them--to go off! Why, yes!"

"Then--are you," said Million, gazing reproachfully upon him, "one of
these here anarchists?"

He shook his mouse-coloured head.

"Do I look like one, Cousin Nellie? Nothing further from my thoughts
than anarchy. The last thing I'd stand for."

"Then whatever in the wide world d'you want to go dropping bombs for?"
retorted my young mistress. "Dropping 'em on who, I should like to
know?"

  "On the enemy, I guess."

  "Enemy?"

"Sure thing. I wouldn't want to be dropping them on our own folks now,
would I?" said the young American in his pleasant, reasonable voice;
while I, too, gazed at him in wonder at the unexpected things that came
from his firm, clean-shaven lips.

He began again to explain.

"Now you see, Cousin Nellie and Miss Smith, I am taking the aeroplane as
it will be. Absolutely one of the most important factors in modern
warfare----"

"But who's talking about war?" asked the bewildered Million.

"I am," said the young American.

"War?" repeated his cousin. "But gracious alive! Where is there any,
nowadays?"

The glimpse of English landscape outside the window seemed to echo her
question.

There seemed to be no memory of such a terrible and strenuous thing as
war among those gently sloping Sussex Downs, where the white chalk
showed in patches through the close turf, and where the summer haze,
dancing above that chalk, made all the distances deceptive.

From the top of those downs the country, I knew, must look flat as
coloured maps. They lay spread out, those squares and oblongs of
pearl-grey chalk, of green corn, of golden hay, with "the King's peace
over all, dear boys, the King's peace over all," as Kipling said.

The whole country seemed as if the events that had come and gone since
the reign, say, of King John had left no more impression upon it than
the cloud shadows that had rolled and passed, rolled and passed. As it
was in the beginning, so it was in the late June of Nineteen Fourteen.
And so it looked as if it must ever remain.

Yet----Here was an extraordinarily unexpected young man bringing into
the midst of all this sun-lit peace the talk of war! War as it had never
yet been waged; war not only on the land and under the waves, but war
that dropped death from the very clouds themselves!

"I think you're talking silly," said Miss Million severely. "No doubt
there's always a certain amount of warring and fighting going on in
India, where poor dad was. Out-of-the-way places like that, where there
aren't any only black people to fight with, anyhow.... But any other
sort of fighting came to an end with the Bo'r War, where dad was outed.

"And I don't see what it's got to do with you, or why you should think
it so fearfully important to go inventing your bomb-droppers and
what-nots for things what--what aren't going to happen!"

The young American smiled in a distant sort of way.

"So you're one of the people that think war isn't going to happen again?
Well! I guess you aren't lonely. Plenty think as you do," he told his
cousin. "Others think as I do. They calculate that sooner or later it's
bound to come. And that if it comes fortune will favour those that have
prepared for the idea of it. Aren't you a soldier's daughter, Cousin
Nellie?"

The little dark head of Sergeant Million's orphan went up proudly.

  "Rather!"

"Well, then, you'll take a real live interest," said her cousin, "in
something that might make all the difference in the world to your
country, supposing she did come to grips with another country. That's
the difference that would be made by machines like mine. Not that there
is another machine just like my own, I guess. Let me tell you about
her----"

Again he went on talking about his new bomb-dropper in words that I
don't pretend to understand.

I understood the tone, though.

That was unmistakable. It was the rapt and utterly serious tone which a
person speaks in of something that fills his whole heart. I suppose a
painter would speak thus of his beloved art, or a violinist of his
music, or a mother of her adored and only baby boy. I saw the young
American's face light up until it was even as something inspired.

This machine of his, for dropping bombs from the clouds upon the heads
of some enemy that existed if only in his imagination was "his subject."
This was his all. This he lived for. Yes, that was plain to both of us.
I saw Miss Million give an understanding nod of her little dark head as
she said: "Yes, you haven't half set your mind on this thing, have you?"

"I guess you've hit it," said the American. Then Miss Million asked:
"And where does the money part of it come in?"

Then he explained to us that, having invented the thing (it was all a
pure joy apparently), now began the hard work. He had to sell the
machine! He had to get it "taken up," to have it experimented with. All
this would run him into more money than he had got.

He concluded simply: "That's where the Million dollars would come in so
useful! And, Cousin Nellie, I am simply bound to try and get them!"

I watched my mistress's face as he made this announcement. Miss Million,
I saw, was so interested that for the moment she had forgotten her own
obsession, her infatuation for the Honourable Jim Burke. As well as the
interest, though, there was "fight" in the grey eyes of the soldier's
orphan who used to wear a blue-print uniform frock and a black straw hat
with a scarlet ribbon about it.

She said: "I see what you mean. Me give you my money to play with! And
what if I don't hold with investing any of uncle's money in this
harum-scarum idea of yours? I am none so sure that I do hold----"

"Maybe I might have to do a little of the holding myself, Cousin
Nellie," broke in the quiet, firm voice of her American cousin. "See
here! What if I were to put up a tussle to get all that money away from
you, whether you wanted to give it up to me to play with it or not?"

And then he began quickly to explain to her what he had explained to me
coming down in the car. He went over the possibilities of his contesting
Mr. Samuel Million's will.

I don't think I shall ever forget that funny little scene in the
bungalow-furnished room with all those theatrical photographs papering
the walls, and with the windows opening on to the Sussex garden where
the bees boomed in the roses, and the lazy sound mingled with the
chirping of the starlings, and with the shriller chatter of two of the
"Refuge" girls lying in deck-chairs in the shadow of the lilacs.

Inside, these two cousins, young American and young Englishwoman, who
might be going to fight for a fortune, stared at each other with a
measuring glance that was not at all unfriendly. In the eyes of both I
read the same question.

"Now, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about
it?"

After a pause Miss Million said: "Well, this'll mean a lot of worry and
noosance, I suppose. Going to Lawr! Never thought I should come to that
sort of thing. Courts, and lawyers, an' all that----"

She looked straight at the young American, who nodded.

"Yes, I guess that's what fighting this thing out will mean," he agreed.

Miss Million knit her brows.

"Lawr," she said reflectively, voicing the sentiment of our whole sex on
this vexed subject. "Lawr always seems to be ser _silly_! It lets a
whole lot o' things go on that you'd think ought to 'a' been stopped
hundreds of years ago by Ack of Parliament. Then again, it drops on you
like one o' them bombs of yours for something that doesn't make
twopennyworth of difference to anybody, and there you are with forty
shillings fine, at least. An' as for getting anything done with going to
Lawr about it, well, it's like I used to say to the butcher's boy at
Putney when he used to ask me to give him time to get that joint
brought round: 'Time! It isn't time you want, it's Eternity!'

"Going to Lawr! What does it mean? Paying away pots o' money to a lot o'
good-for-nothing people for talking to you till you're silly, and
writing letters to you that you can't make head nor tail of, and then
nothing settled until you're old and grey. If then!"

"That's quite an accurate description of my own feelings towards the
business," said the other candidate for Miss Million's fortune. "I'm not
breaking my neck or straining myself any to hand over to the lawyers any
of the precious dollars that I want for the wedding-portion of my
machine."

"Go to law----No, that's not a thing I want to do," repeated the present
owner of the precious dollars. "Same time, I'm not going to lose any of
the money that's mine by right if I can possibly keep hold on it--that's
only sense, that is!"

And she turned to me, while again I felt as if I were a referee. "What
do you say, Smith?"

  I was deadly puzzled.

I ventured: "But if you've both made up your minds you must have the
money, there doesn't seem anything for it but to go to law, does there?"

"Wait awhile," said the young American slowly. "There does appear to me
to be an alternative. Now, see here----"

He leant towards Miss Million. He held out his hand, as if to point out
the alternative. He said: "There is another way of fixing it, I guess.
We needn't fight. I'd feel real mean, fighting a dear little girl like
you----"

"You won't get round me," said Miss Million, quite as defensively as if
she were addressing a tradesman's boy on a doorstep. "No getting round
me with soft soap, young man!"

"I wasn't meaning it that way," he said, "The way I meant would let us
share the money and yet let's both have the dollars and the glory of the
invention and everything else!"

"I don't know how you mean," declared Miss Million.

I, sitting there in my corner, had seen what was coming.

But I really believe Miss Million herself received the surprise of her
life when her cousin gave his quiet reply.

"Supposing," he said, "supposing we two were to get married?"

"Marry?" cried Miss Million in her shrillest Putney-kitchen voice. "Me?
You?"

She flung up her little, dark head and let loose a shriek of
laughter--half-indignant laughter at that.

Then, recovering herself, she turned upon the young man who had proposed
to her in this quite unconventional fashion and began to--well! there's
no expression for it but one of her own. She began to "go for him."

"I don't call it very funny," she declared sharply, "to go making a joke
of a subject like that to a young lady you haven't known above a half an
hour hardly."

"I wasn't thinking about the humourousness of the proposition, Cousin
Nellie!" protested Mr. Hiram P. Jessop steadily. "I meant it perfectly
seriously."

Miss Million gazed at him from the chair opposite.

Her cousin met that challenging, distrustful gaze unflinchingly. And in
his own grey eyes I noticed a mixture of obstinacy and of quite
respectful admiration. Certainly the little thing was looking very
pretty and spirited.

Every woman has her "day." It's too bad that this generally happens at a
time when nobody calls and there's not a soul about to admire her at her
best. The next evening, when she's got to wear a low-cut frock and go
out somewhere, the chances are a hundred to one that it will be her "day
off," and that she will appear a perfect fright, all "salt-cellars" and
rebellious wisps of hair.

But to proceed with Miss Million, who was walking off with one man's
admiration by means of the added good looks she had acquired by being in
love with another man. Such is life.

"You mean it seriously?" she repeated.

"I do," he said, nodding emphatically. "I certainly do."

Miss Million said: "You must be barmy!"

"Barmy?" echoed her American cousin. "You mean----"

"Off your onion. Up the pole. Wrong in your 'ead--head," explained Miss
Million. "That's what you must be. Why, good gracious alive! The idea!
Proposing to marry a girl the first time you ever set eyes on her.
Smith, did you ever----"

"I never had to sit in the room before while another girl was being
proposed to," I put in uncomfortably. "If you don't mind, Miss, I think
I had better go now, and allow you and Mr. Jessop to talk this over
between yourselves."

"Nothing of the kind, Miss Smith, nothing of the kind," put in the
suitor, turning to me as I stood ready to flee to scenes less
embarrassing. "You're a nice, well-balanced, intell'gent sort of a young
lady yourself. I'd just like to have your point of view about this
affair of my cousin arranging to marry me----"

"I'm not arranging no such thing," cried Miss Million, "and don't mean
to!"

"See here; you'd far better," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, in his kindly,
reasonable, shrewd, young voice. "Look at the worry and discomfort and
argument and inconvenience about the money that she'd avoid"--again
turning to Miss Million's maid--"if she agreed to do so."

"Then, again," he went on, "what a much more comfortable situation for a
young lady of her age and appearance if she could go travelling around
with a husky-looking sort of husband, with a head on his shoulders,
rather than be trapesing about alone, with nothing but a young lady of a
lady's-maid no older or fitter to cope with the battles of life than she
is herself. A husband to keep away the sordid and disagreeable aspects
of life----"

Here I remembered suddenly the visit of that detective who wanted to
search Miss Million's boxes at the Cecil. I thought to myself: "Yes! if
we only had a husband. I mean if she had! It would be a handy sort of
thing to be able to call in next time we were suspected of having taken
anybody's rubies!"

And then I remembered with a shock that I hadn't yet had time to break
it to my mistress that we had been suspected--were probably still
suspected--by that awful Rattenheimer person!

Meanwhile Miss Million's cousin and would-be husband was going on
expatiating on the many advantages, to a young lady in her position, of
having a real man to look after her interests----

"All very true. But I don't know as I'm exactly hard up for a husband,"
retorted Miss Million, with a little simper and a blush that I knew was
called up by the memory of the blue, black-lashed eyes of a certain
Irish scamp and scaramouch who ought to be put in the stocks at Charing
Cross as an example to all nice girls of the kind of young man whom it
is desirable to avoid and to snub. Miss Million added: "I don't know
that I couldn't get married any time I wanted to."

"Sure thing," agreed her cousin gravely. "But the question is, how are
you going to know which man's just hunting you for the sake of Uncle
Sam's dollars? Making love to the girl, with his eyes on the pork
factory?"

"Well, I must say I think that comes well from you!" exclaimed Miss
Million. "You to talk about people wanting to marry me for my money,
when you've just said yourself that you've set your heart on those
dollars of Uncle Sam's for your old aeroplane machine! You're a nice
one!"

"I'm sincere," said the young American, in a voice that no one could
doubt. "I want the dollars. But I wouldn't have suggested marrying
them--if I hadn't liked the little girl that went with them. I told you
right away when I came into this room, Cousin Nellie, that I think
you're a little peach. As I said, I like your pretty little frank face
and the cunning way you fix yourself up. I like your honesty. No beating
about the bush."

He paused a second or so, and then went on.

"'You must be barmy,' says you. It appeared that way to you, and you
said it. That's my own point of view. If you mean a thing, say it out.
You do. I like that. I revere that. And in a charming little girl it's
rare," said the American simply. "I like your voice----"

Here I suppressed a gasp, just in time. He liked Million's voice! He
liked that appalling Cockney accent that has sounded so much more
ear-piercing and nerve-rasping since it has been associated with the
clothes that--well, ought to have such a very much prettier sort of tone
coming out of them!

He liked it. Oh, he must be in love at first sight--at first sound!

"Plenty of these young English girls talk as if it sprained them over
each syllable. You're brisk and peart and alive," he told her earnestly.
"I think you've a lovely way of talking."

Miss Million was taking it all in, as a girl does take in compliments,
whether they are from the right man or from the wrong one. That is, she
looked as if every word were cream to her. Only another woman could have
seen which remark she tossed aside in her own mind as "just what he
said," and which tribute she treasured.

I saw that what appealed to Miss Million was "the lovely way of talking"
and "the cunning way she'd fixed herself up." In fact, the two
compliments she deserved least.

Oh, how I wished she'd say "Yes, thank you," at once to a young man who
would certainly be the solution of all my doubts and difficulties as far
as my young mistress was concerned! He'd look after her. He'd spoil her,
as these Americans do spoil their adored womenkind!

All her little ways would be so "noo," as he calls it, to him, that he
wouldn't realise which of them were--were--were the kind of thing that
would set the teeth on edge of, say, the Honourable Jim Burke.

He--Mr. Hiram P. Jessop--would make an idol and a possession of his
little English wife. That conscienceless Celt would make a
banking-account of her--nothing else.

Oh, yes! How I wished she'd take her cousin and be thankful----

But here was Miss Million shaking her little dusky head against the
gay-coloured cushions.

"I'm sure it's very kind of you to say all this," she told him in a
rather mollified tone of voice, "but I'm afraid we can't arrange things
the way you'd like. A girl can't sort of make herself like people better
than other people, just because it might 'appen to be convenient."

"Other people," repeated the young American quickly. "Am I to take it
that there is some one else that you prefer, Cousin Nellie?"

His cousin Nellie's very vivid blush seemed to be enough answer for him.

He rose, saying slowly: "Why, that's a pity. That makes me feel real out
of it. Still----" He shrugged the broad shoulders under the light-grey
padded coat. "As you say, it can't be helped. I congratulate whoever it
is that----"

"Ow, stop! Gracious alive, there isn't any one to be congratulated yet,"
broke in Miss Million. "Me and--the gentleman haven't gone and
definitely made up our minds about anything, up to now; but--well. As
you say, it's better to have anything 'out.'"

"If you haven't definitely made up your mind," said the young American,
just as he took his leave, "I shan't definitely take 'No' for my own
answer."

And he's gone off now to put up at an hotel in Lewes, so that he can
come over to call at the "Refuge" each day of the week that Miss Million
says we are going to stay here. He thinks, I know, that after all he
will "get round her" to like him.

As if, poor fellow! he had any chance at all against a man like the
Honourable Jim!

Well! He'll soon see, that's all!

                             CHAPTER XXVIII

                          THE CROWDED HOLIDAY

WE have now been staying for two crowded days at the "Refuge." It has
certainly been the most extraordinary holiday of my life. A quite
indescribable one, too!

For when I try to put down in words my impression of what has been
happening, I find in my mind nothing but the wildest jumble of things.
There's a background of sun-lit, open country, wide blue sky patrolled
by rolling white clouds, green downs strewn with loose flint, chalk
wastes on which a patch of scarlet poppies stands out like a made-up
mouth on a dead white face of a pierrot, glimpses of pale cliff beyond
the downs, and of silver-grey Channel further still.

These things are blurred in a merry chaos with so many new faces!
There's the drowsy, good-natured, voluptuous face of "Marmora, the
breathing statue-girl," as she lounged in the deck-chair in the shadow
of the lilacs, crunching Mackintosh's toffee-de-luxe and reading "The
Rosary." The tiny, vivacious face of the Boy-Impersonator. The shrewd
face of Vi Vassity, the mistress of the "Refuge," melting into
unexpected tenderness as she bends over the new baby that belongs to the
ventriloquist's wife, the little bundle with the creasy pink face and
the hands that are just clusters of honeysuckle buds....

So many sounds, too, are mixed up with this jumble of fresh impressions!

Rustling of sea winds in the immemorial elm trees. Buzzing of bees in
the tall limes all hung with light-green fragrant tassels! Twittering of
birds! Comfortable, crooning noises of plump poultry in the back yard of
the "Refuge."

Through all these sound the chatter and loud laughter of the "resting"
theatrical girls with their eternal confidences that begin, "I said to
him just like this," and their "Excuse me, dears," and their sudden
bursts of song. How the general rush, and whirl, and glitter, and
clatter of them would make my Aunt Anastasia feel perfectly faint!

Eight or ten aspirins, I should think, would not be enough to restore
her, could she but have a glimpse of the society into which Lady
Anastasia's great-granddaughter is now plunged.

And in such an "infra dig." position, too!

For I am not "an artist," as they all are! I am distinctly quite below
them! I am in domestic service. A "dresser" of the girl whom all of them
call "Nellie" when they are not using the generic "dears" and "darlings"
to her. And yesterday I heard the Serio-singer with the autumn-foliage
hair telling the stout lady (whose place in life seems to be swinging on
a trapeze in emerald-green tights and with a parrakeet perched on each
wrist) "That that little Smith was quite a nice, refined sort of little
thing, very different from the usual run of girls of that class. They're
so common, as a rule. But this one--well! She's the sort of girl you
didn't mind sitting down with, or saying anything in front of.

"Her and Nellie Million seemed to be more like two sisters than mistress
and maid, what I can see of it," said the washed-out-looking Serio, who
"makes up," Million says, with dark brows and well-defined scarlet lips
until she must be quite effective, "on."

"There's something very queer about those two girls, and the way they
are together," added the Serio. (One really can't help overhearing these
theatrical voices, and all the windows were wide open.) "There's that
gentleman cousin of Nellie's, who always calls the other girl 'Miss'
Smith. D'you notice, Emmie? He treats her for all the world as if she
were a duchess in disguise! It might be her he was after, instead of the
other one?"

"With Americans," said the green-tights-and-parrakeets lady
impressively, "it's a fair puzzle to know what they are 'after'!"

She, I know, has toured a good deal in the States. So she ought to know
what she is talking about. But Mr. Hiram P. Jessop is the only American
of whom I can say that I have seen very much.

Each day he has driven over from Lewes, that drowsy old town with one
pricked-up ear of a castle on a hill; and he spends hours and hours
talking to the little cousin whom I really think he sincerely likes.

"And, mind you! I am not saying that I don't like him," Miss Million
confided to me last night as I was brushing her hair. "Maybe I might
have managed to get myself quite fond of him, if--if," she sighed--"I
hadn't happened to meet somebody else first. I don't see any manner of
use in getting engaged to one young man when it is another that you
fancy. Simply asking for trouble, that is. Haven't I read tales and
tales about that sort of thing?"

I sighed as I tied a bit of pink ribbon round the ends of Miss Million's
dark plaits. If only she hadn't happened ever to meet that incorrigible
Jim Burke!

"You haven't heard from him, Miss Million?" I suggested. "You haven't
seen anything of him since he went off after lunch the day I came over
with your cousin?"

"I tell you what it is, Smith. You have got a down on him! Always had,
for some reason," said Miss Million quite fretfully. She got up from the
chair in front of the looking-glass and stood, a defiant little sturdy
figure in the new crepe-de-chine nightie with the big silken "M" that I
had embroidered just over her honest heart. "You are always trying to
make out that the Hon. Mr. Burke is not to be trusted, or somethink. I
am sure you are wrong."

"What makes you so sure of that?" I asked rather ruefully.

"Well, it isn't likely I should take a fancy to any one I didn't think I
could trust," said Miss Million firmly. "And as for his not having been
here this last day or two, well! I don't think anything of that. A
gentleman has got his business to attend to, whatever it may be. Hasn't
he?"

  I said nothing.

"I am not fretting one bit just because he has not been to see me,"
maintained Miss Million stoutly, in a way that convinced me only too
well how her whole heart was set upon the next time she should see the
Hon. Jim. "It would not surprise me at all if he just turned up for that
picnic on the cliffs that we are all going to to-morrow. I know Vi told
him he could come to that. I bet he will come. And in those tales,"
added Miss Million, "it is very often at a picnic that the hero chooses
to go and ask the young lady to marry him!" She concluded with an
inflection of hope in the voice that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had said was so
pretty.

Poor Mr. Jessop! He may win Million's fortune for his aeroplane
invention. But good-bye to his chances of the heiress herself if the
Hon. Jim does turn up to-morrow.

The Hon. Jim Burke did turn up. But not at the picnic, exactly.... Let
me tell you about it from the beginning. The picnic was to take place on
the cliffs near Rottingdean. Some of the "Refugettes" walked, looking
like a band of brightly dressed, buoyant-spirited schoolgirls on a
holiday. Two of the party, namely, Mr. Jessop and his cousin, my
mistress, motored in the little two-seater car that he had kept on to
stay with him in Lewes. Others had hired donkeys, "for the fun of the
thing." Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, and her friend, the
Boy-Impersonator, had been very sweet and friendly in their offers to me
to join the donkey-riding party. But for some reason I felt I wanted to
be quiet. I had one of those "aloof" moods which I suppose everybody
knows. One feels not "out of tune" with one's surroundings, and
disinclined for conversation. The girls and Miss Vi Vassity and my
mistress and the one man at the picnic, namely, Mr. Jessop, all seemed
to me like gaily coloured pictures out of some vivacious book. Something
to look at! After the noisy, laughing lunch, when the party had broken
up into chattering groups of twos and threes, and were walking farther
down the cliffs, I felt as if I were glad that for a few minutes this
gay and amusing book could be closed. I didn't go with any of them. I
pleaded tiredness. I said I would stay behind and have a little rest on
the turf, in the shadow of Miss Vi Vassity's bigger car that had brought
over the luncheon things.

The party melted away. I watched them disappear in a sort of moving
frieze between the thymy turf and the hot, blue sky. Then I made a couch
for myself of one of the motor-rugs and a gay-coloured cushion or two. I
had taken off my black hat and I curled myself up comfortably in a long
reverie. My thoughts drifted at last towards that subject which they
accuse girls' thoughts (quite unjustly!) of never leaving.

The subject of getting married! Was I or was I not going to get married?
Should I say "Yes" or "No" to Mr. Brace when that steady and reliable
and desirable young Englishman returned from Paris, and came to me for
his answer? Probably "Yes." There seemed no particular reason why it
should not be "Yes." I quite like him, I had always rather liked him. As
for him, he adored me in his honest way. I could hear again the
unmistakable earnestness in his voice as he repeated the time-honoured
sentiment, "You are the one girl in the world for me!"

Why should I even laugh a little to myself because he used a rather
"obvious" expression?--an expression that "everybody" uses. If you
come to that, nobody else has ever used it to me! And I don't believe
that he, Mr. Reginald Brace, has ever used it before. It would not
surprise me at all if he had never made love, real, respectful,
with-a-view-to-matrimony love, to any other girl but me.

Very likely he's scarcely even flirted with anybody else.

Something tells me that I should be the very first woman in this man's
life.

Now isn't that a beautiful idea?

No other woman in the world will have taught him how to make love.

Any girl ought to be pleased with a husband like that! She would not
have to worry her head about "where" he learnt to be so attractive, and
sympathetic, and tactful, and companionable, and to give all the right
sort of little presents and to say all the right kind of pretty things.
She would not have to feel that he must have been "trained" through love
affairs of every kind, class and age. She would not have to catch, in
his speech, little "tags" of pointed, descriptive, feminine expression;
she wouldn't have to wonder: What girl used he to hear saying that? Ah,
no! The wife of a man like Mr. Reginald Brace wouldn't be made to feel
like purring with pleasure over the deft way he tied the belt of her
sports coat and pinned in her collar at the back or put her wrap about
her shoulders at the end of the second act--she wouldn't have to
remember: "Some woman must have taught him to be so nice in these
'little ways' that make all the difference to us women...."

There'd be none of all this about Mr. Brace. I should be the first--the
one--the only Love! Oughtn't that thought to be enough to please and
gratify any girl?

  And I am gratified....

  I must be gratified.

If I haven't been feeling gratified all this time, it's simply because
I've been so "rushed" with the worry of Miss Million's disappearance,
and of all that business about the detective, and the missing ruby. (I
wonder, by the way, if we have heard the last of all that business?)

Anybody would like a young man like Mr. Brace! Even Aunt Anastasia, when
she came to know him. Even she would rather I were a bank manager's wife
than that I went on being a lady's-maid for the rest of my life....

"And, besides, I'm not like poor Million, who's allowed her affections
to get all tangled up in the direction of the sort of young man who'd
make the worst husband in the world," I thought, idly, as I turned my
head more comfortably on the cushion. "Poor dear! If she married Mr.
Jessop, it would be better for her. But still, she would be giving her
hand to one man, while her heart had been--well, 'wangled,' we'll say,
by another. How dreadful to have to be in love with a man like that
mercenary scapegrace of a Jim Burke! How any girl could be so foolish as
to give him one serious thought----"

Here I gave up thinking at all. With my eyes shut I just basked, to the
tune of the bees booming in the scented thyme about me and the waves
washing rhythmically at the foot of the tall white cliff on the top of
which our noisy party had been feasting.

It was nice to be alone here now, quite alone.... The washing of the
waves seemed presently to die away in my ears. The booming of the bees
in those pink cushions of thyme seemed to grow fainter and fainter....
Then these sounds began to increase again in a sweet, and deep, and
musical crescendo. Very pretty, that chorus of the bees!

I kept my eyes shut and I listened.

The refrain seemed actually to grow into a little rhythmic tune.
Then--surely those were words that were fitted to the tune? Yes! I
caught the words of that tender old Elizabethan cradle song:

                  "Gol-den slum-bers kiss your eyes!"

For a second I imagined that the Serio-girl had stolen up, and, thinking
I was asleep, had begun to sing me awake.