MISS MILLION'S MAID

"Why, she's going to ask me down there, too, to one of her week-end parties!"

Copyright, 1915, by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

chapter page

• The Young Man Next Door [1]
• Two Girls in a Kitchen [10]
• A Bolt from the Blue [17]
• The Lawyer's Dilemma [26]
• Million Leaves Her Place [31]
• Another Rumpus! [36]
• My Departure [44]
• I Become Million's Maid [53]
• We Move into New Quarters [60]
• An Orgy of Shopping [67]
• An Old Friend of the Family [72]
• The Day of the Party [82]
• My First "Afternoon Out" [96]
• Cream and Compliments [105]
• A Different Kind of Party [118]
• A Word of Warning [129]
• Revelry by Night [141]
• My First Proposal [150]
• Waiting for the Reveller [156]
• Where Is She? [168]
• An Unexpected Invasion [180]
• Her Cousin to the Rescue [191]
• I Start on the Quest [206]
• We Seek the "Refuge" [220]
• Found! [231]
• Miss Million in Love [241]
• An Unusual Sort of Beggar [255]
• The Crowded Holiday [273]
• Locked Up! [307]
• Out on Bail [319]
• Million Bucks Up [344]
• Wales Forever! [354]
• Miss Million Has an Idea! [372]
• The Fortunes of War [384]

CHAPTER I

THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR

My story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in any household that boasts—or perhaps deplores—a high-spirited girl of twenty-three in it.

It begins with "a row" about a young man.

My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began—in a garden.

It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street, Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.

Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road are one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.

From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class, not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father, the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who call laughing remarks to each other out of the window.

"I say, Gladys! don't forget it's the theatre to-night!"

"Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?"

"No; I'm meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street."

"Dissipated rakes! 'We don't have much money, but we do see life,' eh?"

Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of their lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the population of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship and enjoyment going on all up and down our road.

Except here. No laughter and parties and tennis club appointments at No. 45, where I, Beatrice Lovelace, live with my Aunt Anastasia. No gay times here!

When we came here six years ago (I was eighteen) Aunt Anastasia was rigidly firm about our having absolutely nothing to do with the people of the neighbourhood.

"They are not our kind," she said with her stately, rather thin grey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in the world, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your dear grandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped out of our world, we need not associate with any other. Better no society than the wrong society."

So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no society at all. I can't tell you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribably dull and lonely it all is!

I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so many of them about here!

"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter together on their lawn over some family joke or other—I listened enviously to their merriment.

I wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the one with my own name, Beatrice—I know some of them by name as well as I know them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live in this road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've never been allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've never exchanged a single——

"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my reverie.

Startled, I glanced up.

The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44. Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings ("so that we should be more private") I beheld a gleam of white flannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair.

It was the young man who's lately come to live next door.

I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he would like to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by.

I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course, according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed him now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap. Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other side of the garden.

But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels like doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day!

It won the evening, that time.

I said: "Good evening."

And I thought that would be the end of it, but no.

The frank and boyish voice (quite as nice a voice as my soldier-brother Reggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er—I say, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?"

It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost about thirty shillings.

He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won't you?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over the railings and put the end of the hose straight into my hand.

"Oh, thank you; but I will not trouble you. Good evening."

Of course, that would have been the thing to say, icily, before I walked off.

Unfortunately I only got as far as "Oh, thank you——" And then my fingers must have fumbled the tap on or something. Anyhow, a great spray of water immediately poured forth from out of the hose through the roses and the trellis, right on to the fair head and the face of the young man next door.

"Oh!" I cried, scarlet with embarrassment. "I beg your pardon——"

"It's quite all right, thanks," he said. "Most refreshing!"

Here I realised that I was still giving him a shower-bath all the time.

Then we both laughed heartily together. It was the first good laugh I'd had for months! And then I trained the hose off him at last and on to our border, while the young man, watching me from over the palings, said quickly:

"I've been wanting to talk to you, do you know? I've been wanting to ask——"

Well, I suppose I shall never know now, what he wanted to ask. For that was the moment when there broke upon the peaceful evening air the sound of a voice from the back window of our drawing-room, calling in outraged accents:

"Beatrice! Bee—atrice!"

Immediately all the laughter went out of me.

"Y—yes, Aunt Anastasia," I called back. In my agitation I dropped the end of the hose on to the ground, where it began irrigating the turf and my four-and-elevenpenny shoes at the same time.

"Beatrice, come in here instantly," called my aunt in a voice there was no gainsaying.

So, leaving the hose where it lay, and without another glance at the trellis, in I dashed through the French window into our drawing-room.

A queer mixture of a room it is. So like us; so typical of our circumstances! A threadbare carpet and the cheapest bamboo easy-chairs live cheek-by-jowl with a priceless Chippendale cabinet from Lovelace Court, holding a few pieces of china that represent the light of other days. Upon the faded cheap wallpaper there hangs the pride of our home, the Gainsborough portrait of one chestnut-haired, slim-throated ancestress, Lady Anastasia Lovelace, in white muslin and a blue sash, painted on the terrace steps at Lovelace Court.

This was the background to the figure of my Aunt Anastasia, who stood, holding herself as stiff as a poker (she is very nearly as slim, even though she's fifty-three) in her three-year-old grey alpaca gown with the little eightpence-three-farthings white collar fastened by her pearl brooch with granny's hair in it.

Her face told me what to expect. A heated flush, and no lips. One of Auntie's worst tempers!

"Beatrice!" she exclaimed in a low, agitated tone. "I am ashamed of you. I am ashamed of you." She could not have said it more fervently if I'd been found forging cheques. "After all my care! To see you hobnobbing like a housemaid with these people!"

Aunt Anastasia always mentions the people here as who should say "the worms in the flower-beds" or "the blight upon the rambler-roses."

"I wasn't hobnobbing, Auntie," I defended myself. "Er—he only offered me the hose to——"

"The thinnest of excuses," put in my aunt, curling what was left visible of her lips. "You need not have taken the hose."

"He put it right into my hand."

"Insufferable young bounder," exclaimed Aunt Anastasia, still more bitterly.

I felt myself flushing hotly.

"Auntie, why do you always call everybody that who is not ourselves?" I ventured. "'Honour bright,' the young man didn't do it in a bounder-y way at all. I'm sure he only meant to be nice and neighbourly and——"

"That will do, Beatrice. That will do," said my Aunt majestically. "I am extremely displeased with you. After all that I have said to you on the subject of having nothing to do with the class of person among which we are compelled to live, you choose to forget yourself over—over a garden wall, and a hose, forsooth.

"For the future, kindly remember that you are my niece"—(impressively)—"that you are your poor father's child"—(more impressively)—"and that you are Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter"—(this most impressively of all, with a stately gesture towards the Gainsborough portrait hanging over the most rickety of bamboo tables). "Our circumstances may be straitened now. We may be banished to an odious little hovel in the suburbs among people whom we cannot possibly know, even if the walls are so thin that we can hear them cleaning their teeth next door. There is no disgrace in being poor, Beatrice. The disgrace lies in behaving as if you did not still belong to our family!"

Aunt Anastasia always pronounces these last two words as if they were written in capital letters, and as if she were uttering them in church.

"I am going to the library now to change my books," she concluded with much dignity. "During my absence you will occupy yourself by making the salad for supper."

"Yes, Auntie," I said in the resigned tone that so often covers seething rebellion. Then a sudden thought struck me, and I suggested: "Hadn't I—hadn't I better return that hose? It is simply pouring itself out all over the lawn still——"

"I will return the hose," said my aunt, in the tragic tones of Mrs. Siddons playing Lady Macbeth and saying "Give me the dagger!"

She stepped towards the back window.

I didn't feel equal to seeing the encounter between Aunt Anastasia in her most icily formal mood and the young man with the nice voice, of whom I caught white-and-gold glimpses hovering about on the other side of the green trellis.

I knew she'd be rude to him, as only "our families" can be rude to those whom they consider "bounders." He's nothing to me. I've never spoken to him before this evening. I oughtn't to mind what he thinks about those weird people who live at No. 45. I oughtn't to wonder what it was he was just going to say to me.

So I fled out of the bamboo and heirloom furnished drawing-room, down the narrow little oil-clothed passage, and into the kitchen with its heartening smell of hot gooseberry tart and the cheerful society of Million, our little maid-of-all-work. It's the custom of our family to call the maid by her surname.

(At the same time I couldn't help wondering what that young man had been going to say.)

CHAPTER II

TWO GIRLS IN A KITCHEN

Little Million, looking very cheery and trim in her black gown and her white apron, and the neat little cap perched upon her glossy black hair, smiled welcomingly upon me as I came into the kitchen.

I like Million's nice smile and her Cockney chatter about the Soldiers' Orphanage where she was brought up and trained for domestic service, and about her places before she came here. Aunt Anastasia considers that it is so demoralising to gossip with the lower orders. But Millions is the only girl of my own age in London with whom I have the chance of gossiping!

She likes me, too. She considers that Miss Beatrice treats her as if she were a human being instead of a machine. She tossed the paper-covered Celandine Novelette that she had been reading into the drawer of the kitchen-table among the lead spoons and the skewers and the cooking-forks, and then she spread the table with a clean tea-cloth, and brought out the colander with the lettuce and the cucumber and the cress that I was going to cut up into salad; doing everything as if she liked helping me.

"There, now! What a mercy I left the kitchen window open. Now I haven't seen the new moon through the glass!" she exclaimed, as she put all ready before me—the hard-boiled egg, the mustard, sugar, pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar—for me to make the salad-dressing. "Miss Beatrice, look at it through the open window—there, just to the right of that little pink cloud—turn your money, and you'll get a wish."

I peeped out of the window, and caught sight of that slender festoon of silver swung in the sky above the roses of the garden trellis.

"I've no money to turn," I smiled ruefully, "never have."

"Turn some o' mine, Miss," said Million. "I've got four-and-six here that I'm going to put into the Post Office Savings Bank to-morrow." Million is extraordinarily thrifty. "There you are. Wished your wish, Miss Beatrice?"

"Oh, yes, I've wished it," I said. "Always the same wish with me, you know, Million. Always a perfectly hopeless one. It's always, always that some millionaire may leave me a fortune one day, and that I shall be very rich, rolling in money."

"D'you think so much of money, then, Miss Beatrice?" said Million, bustling over the black-and-white chequered linoleum to the range, and setting the lid on to her saucepan full of potatoes. "Rich people aren't always happy——"

"That's their own fault for not knowing how to spend the money!"

"Ah, but I was readin' a sweetly pretty tale all about that just now. 'Love or Money,' that was the name of it," said Million, nodding at the kitchen-table drawer in which she keeps her novelettes, "and it said these very words: 'Money doesn't buy everythin'.'"

"H'm! It would buy most of the things I want!" I declared as I sliced away at my cucumber. "The lovely country house where I'd have crowds of people, all kinds of paralysingly interesting people to stay with me! The heavenly times in London, going everywhere and seeing everything! The motors! And, oh, Million"—I heard my voice shake with yearning as I pronounced the magic name of what every woman thinks of when she thinks of having money—"oh, Million, the clothes I'd get! If I had decent clothes I'd be decent-looking. I know I should."

"Why, Miss Beatrice, I've always thought you was a very nice-looking young lady, anyhow," said our little maid staunchly. "And to-night you're really pretty; I was just passing the remark to myself when you came in. Look at yourself in my little glass——"

I looked at myself in the mirror from the sixpence-ha'penny bazaar. I saw a small, pink, heart-shaped face with large brown eyes, eyes set wide apart and full of impatience and eagerness for life. I saw a quantity of bright chestnut hair, done rather "anyhow." I saw a long, slender, white throat—just the throat of Lady Anastasia—sloping down into shoulders that are really rather shapely. Only how can anything on earth look shapely under the sort of blouse that Aunt Anastasia gets for me? Or the sort of serge skirt? Or the shoes?

I glanced down at those four-and-elevenpenny canvas abominations that were still sopping from the gardening hose, and I said with fervour: "If I had money, I'd have three pairs of new shoes for every day in the week. And each pair should cost as much as all my clothes have cost this year!"

"Fancy that, now. That's not the kind of thing as I'd care for myself. Extravagant—that's a thing I couldn't be," declared Million, in her cheerful, matter-of-fact little voice, sweeping up the hearth as she spoke. "Legacies and rolling in money—and a maid to myself, and bein' called 'Miss Million,' and all that. That 'ud never be my wish!"

"What was your wish, then?" I asked, beginning to tear up the crisp leaves of the lettuce into the glass salad-bowl. "I've told you mine, Million. Tell me yours."

"Sure, you won't let on to any one if I do?" returned our little maid, putting her black, white-capped head on one side like a little bird. "Sure you won't go and make game of me afterwards to your Aunt Nasturtium—oh, lor'. Hark at me, now!—to Miss Lovelace, I mean? If there's one thing that does make me feel queer it's thinking folks are making game of me."

"I promise I won't. Tell me the wish!"

Million laughed again, coloured, twiddled her apron. Then, leaning over the deal table towards me, she murmured unexpectedly and bashfully: "I always wish that I could marry a gentleman!"

"A gentleman?" I echoed, rather taken aback.

"Of course, I know," explained Million, "that a young girl in my walk of life has plenty of chances of getting married. Not like a young lady in yours, Miss. Without a young lady like you has plenty of money there's a very poor choice of husbands!"

"There is, indeed," I sighed.

The little maid went on: "So I could have some sort of young man any day, Miss Beatrice. There's the postman here—very inclined to be friendly—not to mention the policeman. And the young man who used to come round to attend to the gas at the Orphanage when I was there. He writes to me still."

"And do you write back to him?"

"Picture postcards of Richmond Park. That's all he's ever had from me. He's not the sort of young man I'd like. You see, Miss, I've seen other sorts," said Million. "Where I was before I came here there was three sons of the house, and seein' so much of them gave me a sort of cri—terion, like. One was in the Navy. Oh, Miss, he was nice. Oh, the way he talked. It was better than 'The Flag Lieutenant.' It's a fact, I'd rather listen to his voice than any one's on the stage, d'you know.

"The two others were at Oxford College. And oh, their lovely ties, and the jolly, laughing sort of ways they had, and how they used to open the door for their mother, and to sing in the bathroom of a morning. Well! I dunno what it was, quite. Different," said little Million vaguely, with her wistfully ambitious grey eyes straying out of the kitchen window again. "I did like it. And that's the sort of gentleman I'd like to marry."

She turned to the oven again, and moved the gooseberry tart to the high shelf.

I said, smiling at her: "Million, any 'gentleman' ought to be glad to marry you for your pastry alone."

"Oh, lor', Miss, I'm not building on it," said Million brightly. "A sergeant's daughter? A girl in service? Why, what toff would ever think of her? 'Tisn't as if I was on the stage, where it doesn't seem to matter what you've been. Or as if I was 'a lovely mill-hand,' like in those tales where they always marry the son of the owner of the works. So what's the good of me thinking? Not but what I make up dreams in my head, sometimes," admitted Million, "of what I'd do and say—if 'He' did and said!"

"All girls have those dreams, Million," I told her, "whether they're maids or mistresses."

"Think so, Miss Beatrice?" said our little maid. "Well, I suppose I'm as likely to get my wish of marrying a gentleman as you are of coming in for a fortune. Talking of gentlemen, have you noticed the tall, fair one who's come to live at No. 44? Him that plays the pianoler of an evening? In a City office he is, their girl told me. Wanted to get into the Army, but there wasn't enough money. Well, he's one of the sort I'd a-liked. A real gentleman, I call him."

And Auntie calls him an insufferable young bounder!

Funny, funny world where people give such different names to the same thing!

I can see it's going to take Aunt Anastasia a week before she forgives me the incident of the young man next door!

Supper this evening was deathly silent; except for the scrunching over my salad, just like footsteps on the gravel. After supper we sat speechless in the drawing-room. I darned my holey tan cashmere stockings.

Auntie read her last book from the library, "Rambles in Japan." She's always reading books of travel—"Our Trip to Turkey," "A Cycle in Cathay," "Round the World in a Motor-boat," and so on. Poor dear! She would so adore travelling! And she'll never get the chance except in print. Once I begged her to sell the Gainsborough portrait of Lady Anastasia, and take out the money in having a few really ripping tours. I thought she would have withered me with her look.

She'll never do anything so desperately disrespectful to our family. She'll never do anything, in fact. Nothing will ever happen. Life will just go on and on, and we shall go on too, getting older, and shabbier, and more "select," and duller. They say that fortune knocks once in a lifetime at every one's door. But I'm sure there'll never be a knock at the door of No. 45 Laburnum Grove, except——

"Tot—Tot!"

Ah! the postman. Then Million's quick step into the hall. Then nothing further. No letters for us? The letter must have been for our little maid. Perhaps from the young man who attended to the Orphanage gas? Happy Million, to have even an unwanted young man to write to her!

CHAPTER III

A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

Oh! to think that fortune should have given its knock at the door of No. 45 after all! To think that this is how it should have happened! Of all the unexpected thunderbolts! And after that irresponsible talk about money and legacies and wishes this evening in the kitchen, and to think that Destiny had even then shuffled the cards that she has just dealt!

It was ten minutes after the postman had been that we heard a flurried tap on the drawing-room door, and Million positively burst into the room. She was wide-eyed, scarlet with excitement. She held a letter out towards us with a gesture as if she were afraid it might explode in her hand.

"What is this, Million?" demanded my aunt, severely, over the top of her "Rambles."

"Oh, Miss Lovelace!" gasped our little maid. "Oh, Miss Beatrice! I don't rightly know if I'm standing on my head or my heels. I don't know if I've got the right hang of this at all. Will you—will you please read it for me?"

I took the letter.

I read it through without taking any of it in, as so often happens when something startling meets one's eyes.

Million's little fluttered voice queried, "What do you make of that, Miss?"

"I don't know. Wait a minute. I must read it over again," I gasped in turn. "May I read it aloud?"

Million, clutching her starched white apron, nodded.

I read it aloud, this letter of Destiny.

It bore the address of a lawyer's office in Chancery Lane, and it began:

"To Miss Nellie Million.

"Dear Madam:—I am instructed to inform you that under the will of your late uncle, Mr. Samuel Million, of Chicago, U.S.A., you have been appointed heiress to his fortune of one million dollars.

"I shall be pleased to call upon you and to await your instructions, if you will kindly acquaint me with your present address——"

"That was sent to the Orphanage," whispered Million.

"or I should be very pleased to meet you if you would make it convenient to come and call upon me here at my offices at any time which may suit you. I am, Madam,

"Yours obediently,

"Josiah Chesterton."

There was silence in our drawing-room. Million's little face turned, with a positively scared expression, from Aunt Anastasia to me.

"D'you think it's true, Miss?"

"Have you ever heard of this Mr. Samuel Million before?"

"Only that he was poor dad's brother that quarrelled with him for enlisting. I heard he was in America, gettin' on well——"

"That class," murmured my Aunt Anastasia with concentrated resentment, "always gets on!"

That was horrid of her!

I didn't know how to make it up to Million. I put out both hands and took her little roughened hands.

"Million, I do congratulate you. I believe it's true," I said heartily, finding my voice at last. "You'll have heaps of money now. Everything you want. A millionaire's heiress, that's what you are!"

"Me, miss?" gasped the bewildered-looking Million. "Me, and not you, that wanted money? Me an heiress? Oh, lor'! whatever next?"

The next morning—the morning after that startling avalanche of news had been precipitated into the monotonous landscape of our daily lives—I accompanied Million to the lawyer's office, where she was to hear further particulars of her unexpected, her breath-taking, her epic legacy.

A million dollars! Two hundred thousand pounds! And all for the little grey-eyed, black-haired daughter of a sergeant in a line regiment, brought up in a soldiers' orphanage to domestic service at £20 a year! To think of it!

I could see my Aunt Anastasia thinking of it—with bitterness, with envy.

It was she who ought to have taken Million to that office in Chancery Lane.

But she—the mistress of the house—excused herself by saying it was her morning for doing the silver.

We left her in the kitchen surrounded by what I am irreverent enough to call the relics of our family's grandeur—the Queen Anne tea service, the Early Georgian forks and spoons that have been worn and polished fragile and thin. Indeed, one teaspoon is broken. Aunt Anastasia took to her bed on the day of that accident. And the maid we had before Million scoured my grandfather's Crimean medal so heartily that soon there would have been nothing left to see on it. Since then my aunt has tended the relics with her own hands.

We left her brooding darkly over the injustice that had brought fortune to a wretched little maid-of-all-work and poverty to our family; we hailed the big white motor-'bus at the top of the road by the subscription library, and dashed up the steps to the front seat.

"There! Bit of all right, this, ain't it, Miss Beatrice!" gasped Million ecstatically.

Stars of delight shone in each grey eye as she settled herself down on the tilted seat. I thought that this change of expression was because she had thought over her marvellous good fortune during the night, and because she had begun to realise a little what it would all mean to her. But I was quite wrong. Million, peering down over the side of the 'bus, exclaimed gleefully, "Look at 'em! Look at 'em!"

"Look at what?"

"At all the girls down our road, there," explained Million, with a wave of her tightly gloved hand.

At almost every house in Laburnum Grove a maid, in pink or lilac print, with pail and floor-cloth, was giving the steps their matutinal wash. One was polishing the knocker, the bell-handles, and the brass plate of the doctor's abode.

"And here am I, as large as life, a-ridin' on a 'bus the first thing in the morning!" enlarged Million, clenching her fists and sitting bolt upright. "At half-past nine o'clock, if you please—first time I've ever done such a thing! I've often wondered what it was like, top of a 'bus on a fine summer's morning! I'll know now!"

"You won't ever have to know again," I laughed as I sat there beside her. "You won't be going in any more 'buses or trams or tubes."

"Why ever not, miss?" asked Million, startled.

"Why! Because you'll have your own car to go about in directly, of course," I explained. "Probably two or three cars——"

"Cars?" echoed Million, staring at me.

"Why, of course. Don't you see there's a new life beginning for you now? A Rolls-Royce instead of a motor-'bus, and everything on the same scale. You'll have to think in sovereigns now, Million, where you've always thought in pennies——"

"What? Three pounds for a thrupenny ride to the Bank, d'you mean, miss?" cried Million, with a little shriek. "Oh, my godfathers!"

At that excited little squeal of hers another passenger on the 'bus had turned to glance at her across the gangway.

I met his eyes; the clear, blue, boyish eyes of the young man from next door.

He looked away again immediately. There was an expression on his face that seemed meant to emphasise, to underline, the announcement that he had never seen me before. No. Apparently he had never set eyes on the small, chestnut-haired girl (myself) in the shabby blue serge coat and skirt and the straw hat that had been white last summer, and that was now home-dyed—rather unsuccessfully—to something that called itself black. So evidently Aunt Anastasia had been rude to him about yesterday evening. Possibly she had forbidden him to speak to her niece and her dear brother's child, and Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter ever again. This made my blood boil. Why must she make us look so ridiculous? Such—such futile snobs? Without any apparent excuse for keeping ourselves so aloof, either! To put on "select" airs without any circumstances to carry them off with is like walking about in a motor-coat and goggles when you haven't got any motor, when you never will have any motor! It's Million who will have those.

Anyhow, I felt I didn't want him to think I was as absurd as my aunt. I cleared my throat. I turned towards him. In quite a determined sort of voice I said "Good morning!"

Hereupon the young man from next door raised his straw hat, and said "Good morning" in a polite but distant tone.

He glanced at Million, then away again. In the blue eye nearest to me I think I surprised a far-away twinkle. How awful! Possibly he was thinking, "H'm! So the dragon of an aunt doesn't let the girl out now without a maid as a chaperon to protect her! Is she afraid that somebody may elope with her at half-past nine in the morning?"

I was sorry I'd spoken.

I looked hard away from the young man all the rest of the ride to Chancery Lane.

Here we got off.

We walked half-way up the little busy, narrow thoroughfare, and in at a big, cool, cave-like entrance to some offices.

"Chesterton, Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Third Floor," I read from the notice-board. "No lift. Come along, Million."

The stars had faded out of Million's eyes again. She looked scared. She clutched me by the arm.

"Oh, Miss Beatrice! I do hate goin' up!"

"Why, you little silly! This isn't the dentist's."

"I know. But, oh, miss! If there is one thing I can't bear it's being made game of," said Million, pitifully, half-way up the stairs. "This Mr. Chesterton—he won't half laugh!"

"Why should he laugh?"

"At me, bein' supposed to have come in for all those dollars of me uncle's. Do I look like an heiress?"

She didn't, bless her honest, self-conscious little heart. From her brown hat, wreathed with forget-me-nots, past the pin-on blue velvet tie, past the brown cloth costume, down to the quite new shoes that creaked a little, our Million looked the very type of what she was—a nice little servant-girl taking a day off.

But I laughed at her, encouraging her for all I was worth, until we reached the third floor and the clerk's outer office of Messrs. Chesterton, Brown, Jones, and Robinson.

I knocked. Million drew a breath that made the pin-on tie surge up and down upon the breast of her Jap silk blouse. She was pulling herself together, I knew, taking her courage in both hands.

The door was opened by a weedy-looking youth of about eighteen.

"Good morning, Mr. Chesterton. Hope I'm not late," Million greeted him in a sudden, loud, aggressive voice that I had never heard from her before; the voice of nervousness risen to panic. "I've come about that money of mine from my uncle in——"

"Name, Miss, please?" said the weedy youth.

"Nellie Mary Million——"

"Miss Million," I amended. "We have an appointment with Mr. Chesterton."

"Mr. Chesterton hasn't come yet," said the weedy youth. "Kindly take a seat in here."

He went into the inner office. I sat down. Million, far too nervous to sit down, wandered about the waiting-room.

"My, it doesn't half want cleaning in here," she remarked in a flurried whisper, looking about her. "Why, the boy hasn't even taken down yesterday's teacups. I wonder how often they get a woman in. Look at those cobwebs! A shaving-mirror—well, I never!" She breathed on it, polishing it with her black moirette reticule. "Some notice here about 'Courts,' Miss Beatrice. Don't it make you feel as if you was in the dock? I wonder what they keep in this little corner-cupboard."

"The handcuffs, I expect. No, no, Million, you mustn't look at them." Here the weedy youth put in his head again.

CHAPTER IV

THE LAWYER'S DILEMMA

"Step this way, please," he said. With an imploring "You go first, Miss," from the heiress we "stepped" into the inner office. It was a big, handsomely carpeted room, with leather chairs. Around the walls were shelves with black-japanned deed-boxes bearing white-lettered names. I saw little Million's eyes fly to these boxes. I know what she was wildly thinking—that one must be hers and must contain the million dollars of her new fortune. Beside the large cleared desk there was standing a fatherly looking old gentleman. He had white hair, a shrewd, humorous, clean-shaven face, and gold-rimmed glasses. He turned, with a very pleasant smile, to me.

"Good morning, Miss Million," he said. "I am very glad to have the——"

"This is Miss Million," I told him, putting my hand on her brown sleeve and giving her arm a little, heartening pat.

Million moistened her lips and drew another long breath as the fatherly old gentleman turned the eyes and their gold-rimmed glasses upon her small, diffident self.

"Ah! M'm—really! Of course! How do you do, Miss Million?"

"Nicely—nicely, thanks!" breathed Million huskily.

"Won't you sit down, ladies? Yes. Now, Miss Million——"

And Mr. Chesterton began some sort of a congratulatory speech, while Million smiled in a frightened sort of way, breathing hard. She was full of surprises to me that morning; and, I gathered, to her lawyer also.

"Thank you, I'm sure. Thank you, sir," she said. Then suddenly to me, "We didn't ought to—to—to keep this gentleman, did we, Miss?" Then to Mr. Chesterton again, "D'you mind me asking, sir, if we 'adn't better have a cab?"

"A cab?" the lawyer repeated, in a startled tone. "What for?"

"To take away the money, sir," explained little Million gravely. "That money o' mine from me uncle. What I've called about."

"Ah—to take away——" began the lawyer. Then he suddenly laughed outright. I laughed. But together we caught sight of little Million's face, blushing and hurt, sensitive of ridicule. We stopped laughing at once.

And then the old lawyer, looking and speaking as kindly as possible, began to explain matters to this ingenuous little heiress, as painstakingly as if he were making things clear to a child.

"The capital of one million dollars, or of two hundred thousand pounds of English money, is at present not here; it is where it was—invested in the late Mr. Samuel Million's sausage and ham-curing factory in Chicago, U. S. A."

Here Million's face fell.

"Not here. Somehow, Miss," turning to me, "I thought it never sounded as if it could be true. I thought there'd be some kind of a 'have,' sort of!"

"And, subject to your approval always, I should be inclined to allow that capital to remain where it is," continued the old lawyer in his polished accent. "There remains, of course, the income from the capital. This amounts, at present, to ten thousand pounds a year in English money——"

"What is that," breathed the new heiress, "what is that a quarter, sir? It seems more natural like that."

"Two thousand five hundred pounds, Miss Million."

"Lor'!" breathed the owner of this wealth. "And me that's been getting five pounds a quarter. That other's mine?"

"After a few necessary formalities, from which I anticipate no difficulties," said the old gentleman.

Some discussion of these formalities followed. In the midst of it I saw Million begin to fidget even more restlessly.

I frowned at her. This drew the attention of the old gentleman upon me. Million was murmuring something about, "Very sorry. Got to get back soon, Miss. Lunch to lay——"

Absurd Million! As if she would ever have to lay lunch again as long as she lived! Couldn't she realise the upheaval in her world? I gazed reproachfully at her.

The lawyer said to me quite pleasantly: "May I ask if you are a relation of Miss Million?"

Hereupon Miss Million shot at him a glance of outrage. "A relation? Her?" she cried. "The ideear!" Little Million's sense of "caste," fostered at the Soldiers' Orphanage, is nearly as strong as my Aunt Anastasia's. No matter if her secret day-dream has always been "to marry a gentleman." She was genuinely shocked that her old lawyer had not realised the relations between her little hard-working self and our family.

So she announced with simple dignity: "This is Miss Lovelace, the young lady where I am in service."

"Were in service," I corrected her.

Million took me up sharply. "I haven't given notice, Miss. I'm not leaving."

"But, you absurd Million, of course you are," I said. "You can't go on living in Laburnum Grove now. You're a rich man's heiress——"

"Will that stop me living where I want? I'm all alone in the world," faltered Million, suddenly looking small and forlorn as she sat there by the big desk. "You're the only real friend I got in the world, Miss Beatrice. I always liked you. You always talked to me as if you was no more a young lady than what I was. D'you think——" Her voice shook. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of old Mr. Chesterton. "D'you think I'd a-stopped so long with your Aunt Nasturtium if it hadn't been for not wantin' to leave where you was? I'd be lost without you. I shouldn't know where to put myself, Miss. Oh, Miss!" There was a sob in her voice. "Don't say I got to go away from you! What am I to do with myself and all that money?" There was a perplexed silence.

Million's lawyer glanced at me over his gold-rimmed glasses, and I glanced back above Million's forget-me-not-wreathed hat.

It is a problem.

This little lonely, thrifty creature—brought up to such a different idea of life—what is to be done about her now?

CHAPTER V

MILLION LEAVES HER PLACE

Million has gone!

She has left us, our little cheerful, and bonnie, and capable maid-of-all-work who has become a millionaire pork-butcher's heiress!

Never again will her trim, aproned figure busy itself about our small and shockingly inconvenient kitchen at No. 45. Never again will she have to struggle with the vagaries of its range. Never again will she "do out" our drawing-room with its disgraceful old carpet and its graceful old cabinet. Never again will she quail under the withering rebuke with which my Aunt Anastasia was wont to greet her if she returned half a minute late from her evening out. Never again will she entertain me with her stream of artless comments on life and love and her own ambition—"Oh, Miss, dear, I should like to marry a gentleman!"

Well, I suppose there's every probability now that this ambition may be gratified. Plenty of hard-up young men about, even of the Lovelace class, "our" class, who would be only too pleased to provide for themselves by marrying a Million, in both senses of the word.

Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W., will know her no more. And I, Beatrice Lovelace, who was born in the same month of the same year as this other more-favoured girl—I feel as if I'd lost my only friend.

I also feel as if it were at least a couple of years since it all happened. Yet it is only three days since Million and I went down to Chancery Lane together to interview the old lawyer person on the subject of her new riches. I shall never forget that interview. I shall never be able to forget the radiant little face of Million at the end of it all, when the kind old gentleman offered to advance her some of her own money "down on the nail," and did advance her five pounds in cash—five golden, gleaming, solid sovereigns!

"My godfathers!" breathed Million, as she tucked the coins into the palm of her brown-thread glove.

She'd never had so much money at once before in the whole course of her twenty-three years of life. (I've never had it, of course!) And the tangible presence of those heavy coins in her hand seemed to bring it home to Million that she was rich, more than all the explanations of her old lawyer about investments and capital.

I saw him look, half-amusedly, half-anxiously, at the little heiress's flushed face and the gesture with which she clenched that fist full of gold. And it was then that he began to urge upon us that "Miss Million" must find some responsible older person or persons, some ladies with whom she might live while she made her plans respecting the rearrangement of her existence.

To cut a long story short, it was he, the old lawyer, who suggested and arranged for "Miss Million's" next step. It appears that he has sisters "of a reasonable age" (I suppose that means about a hundred and thirty-eight) who are on the committee of a hostelry for gentlewomen of independent means, somewhere in Kensington.

Sure to be a "pussery" of some sort! "Gentlewomen" living together generally relapse into spitefulness and feuds, and "means" can often be pronounced "mean"!

Still, as Million's old lawyer said, the place would provide a haven pro tem.

Our millionairess went off there this morning. She wouldn't take a taxi.

"What's the use o' wasting all that fare from here to Kensington, good gracious?" said Million. "There's no hurry about me getting there long before lunch, after all, Miss Beatrice. And as for me things, they can come by Carter Paterson a bit later. I'll put the card up now, if Miss Lovelace don't mind. There's only that tin trunk that I've had ever since the Orphanage, and me straw basket with the strap round——"

Such luggage for an heiress! I couldn't help smiling at it as it waited in the kitchen entrance. And then the smile turned to a lump in my throat as Million, in her hat and jacket, stumped down the wooden back stairs to say good-bye to me.

"I said good-bye to your Aunt Nastur—to Miss Lovelace, before she went out, Miss." (My aunt is lunching at the hotel of one of her few remaining old friends who is passing through London.)

"Can't say I shall breck my heart missin' her, Miss Beatrice," announced the candid Million. "Why, at the last she shook 'ands—hands as if I was all over black-lead and she was afraid of it coming off on her! But you—you've always been so different, as I say. You always seemed to go on as if"—Million's funny little voice quivered—"as if Gord had made us both——"

"Don't, Million," I said chokily. "I shall cry if you go on like this. And tears are so unlucky to christen a new venture with."

"Is that what they say, Miss?" rejoined the superstitious Million, winking back the fat, shiny drops that were gathering in her own grey eyes. "Aw right, then, I won't. 'Keep smiling,' eh? Always merry and bright, and cetrer. Good-bye, Miss. Oh, lor'! I wish you was coming along with me to this place, instead of me going off alone to face all these strange females——"

"I wish I were; only I shall have to stay and keep the house until my aunt comes back——"

"Drat 'er! I mean——Excuse me, Miss Beatrice. I wish you hadn't a-got to live with her. Thrown away on her, you are. It's you that ought to be clearing out of this place, not just me. You ought to have some sort of a big bust-up and then bunk!"

"Where to, Million?"

"Anywheres! Couldn't you come where I was? Anyways, Miss, will you drop me a line sometimes to say how you're keeping? And, Miss, would you be offended if I said good-bye sort of properly. I know it's like my sorce, but——"

"Oh, Million, dear!" I cried.

I threw both my arms round her sturdy little jacketed figure. We kissed as heartily as if we had been twin sisters instead of ex-mistress and ex-maid.

Then Million—Miss Million, the heiress—trotted off down Laburnum Grove towards the stopping-place of the electric trams. And I, Beatrice Lovelace, the pauper, the come-down-in-the-world, turned back into No. 45, feeling as if what laughter there had been in my life had gone out of it for ever!

I suppose I'd better have lunch—Million's laid it ready for me for the last time!—then sit in the drawing-room, finishing my darning, and waiting for my aunt's return. If Million had been here I could have spent the afternoon with her in the kitchen. Million gone! I feel lost without her.

Nothing else will happen to-day.

There's a ring at the bell. How unlike Aunt Anastasia to forget her key! I must go....

(Later.)

I went. But it was not Aunt Anastatia's herring-slim figure that stood on the doorstep which Million insisted on whitening for the last time this morning. It was the tall, broad-shouldered, active and manly-looking figure of the young man from next door.

CHAPTER VI

ANOTHER RUMPUS!

"Oh!" I said—and felt myself blushing scarlet at the memory of all the absurd little incidents that were between me and this stranger. The incident of the garden-hose, and of my giving him a shower-bath with it the other evening; and how Aunt Anastasia had poured added cold water over him in a metaphorical manner of speaking. Then came the memory of how we had met the next morning on the top of the 'bus when I was chaperoning Million to her lawyer's. And of how the young man, chastened by my aunt's best iced manner the night before, wouldn't even have said "Good morning" unless I had addressed him. It was all very absurd, but confusing.

He said, in that pleasant voice of his: "Good afternoon! I wish to return some property of yours."

"Of mine?" I said, puzzled. I wondered whether a bit of lace of ours or something of that sort had blown out of the window of No. 45 into the garden of No. 44.

But the young man, putting his hand into his jacket pocket, took out and held in the palm of his hand the "property." It was an oval silver brooch, bearing in raised letters the name "Nellie." The young man said, "I noticed it on the top of the 'bus just after you got off the other morning; you must have dropped it——"

"Oh! Thank you so much," I began, taking the brooch. "It isn't mine, as a matter of fact, but——"

"Oh," he said pleasantly, "you are not 'Nellie'?"

Then he hadn't heard Aunt Anastasia calling me in that very rasping voice the other evening.

"No," I said, "'Nellie' is our maid; at least she was our maid."

"Oh, really?" he said, very interested.

He has a delightful face. I don't wonder Million said he was just what she meant by "the sort of young gentleman" that she would like to marry.

Then a thought struck me.

Why not?

Men have married their pretty cooks before now. Why shouldn't this nice young man be Million's fate? He certainly did seem interested in her. It would be a regular King-Cophetua-and-the-Beggar-Maid romance. Only, owing to her riches, it would be Million's rôle to play Queen Cophetua to this young man, who was too poor to go into the Army. So, feeling quite thrilled by the prospect of looking on at this love story, I said: "Would you like to send the brooch on to—to—er—to Miss Nellie Million yourself?" You see, I thought if he knew where to take it, he would probably go at once to the Hostelry for Cats of Independent Means and see Million, and find out about her being now a young lady of leisure—and—well, that might be the beginning of things!

So I smiled at him and added in my most friendly voice, "Would you like me to give you the address?"

It was at this moment—this precise moment before he'd even had time to answer—that Aunt Anastasia, back from her visit to her friend, came up the tiny garden path behind him.

Yes, and this was the scene that met her gaze: her niece, her poor brother's child, Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter (who had already been reproved for forgetting that she belonged to "our family"), standing at the front door of her abode to repeat the offence for which she had been taken to task—namely, "talking to one of the impossible people who live about here!" The way in which Aunt Anastasia stalked past the young man was more withering than the most annihilating glance she could have given him.

To me she said, in a voice that matched her look: "Beatrice, come into the house."

I went into the drawing-room.

She followed me.

Then the storm broke!

Of all the many "rows" I've had since I came to live with Aunt Anastasia, this did, as Million would have said, "take the bun."

"Beatrice!" She threw my name at me as if it had been a glove thrown in my face. "Beatrice! Little cause as I have to think well of you, I did at least trust you!"

"You've no reason, Auntie," said I, holding myself as stiff as she did (which was pretty ramroddy). "You've no reason not to trust me."

"What?" A bitter little laugh. "No sooner is my back turned, no sooner have I left you alone in the house, than you betray my confidence. How do I find you, after all that I said to you only the other evening on this same subject? Standing there on the doorstep, just as if you'd been poor Million, poor little gutter-bred upstart, preparing to receive——"

"I wasn't 'preparing to receive' anybody!" hotly from me.

"No?" with icy satire from Aunt Anastasia. "You were not even going to ask the young man in? You stood there, like a scullery-maid indulging in a vulgar flirtation with a policeman."

"I wasn't, I wasn't."

"I heard you giving him an address where he could write to you, doubtless?"

"Write to me? It was nothing of the kind," I took up, ready to stamp with rage. "It was—it was Million's address I was going to give to that young man."

"A likely story! Million, indeed!"

"You don't believe me? How dare you not, Aunt Anastasia? Look! Here's the proof!" And I held out to her the oval silver brooch with the raised "Nellie" upon it.

"Look! This is Million's brooch. She dropped it on the 'bus the other morning. And the young man from next door found it. And he came round to return it——"

"Yes. As soon as he had made certain, or had been assured, that you would be alone," declared my Aunt Anastasia, with unyielding accusation in every angle of her. "To return Million's brooch! Oh, Beatrice, you must think me very unsophisticated!" The thin lips curled. "This is an excuse even thinner than that about the garden-hose the other evening. No doubt there have been others. How long have you been carrying on this underhand and odious flirtation with that unspeakable young cad?"

"Auntie!" I felt myself shaking all over with justifiable indignation. A flirtation? I? With that young man! Why, why—when I'd such honourable intentions of securing him, as her "gentleman" lover, for our newly made heiress, Million! I simply boiled over with righteous rage. I said, "You've no right to make such a suggestion."

"Beatrice! You forget to whom you are speaking."

"I don't. But I'm twenty-three, and I don't think you need go on treating me as if I were a schoolgirl, refusing to listen to what I have to say. Allowing me no liberty, no friends——"

"Friends! Is that why you make your own in this hole-and-corner fashion?"

"I shouldn't be to blame if I did!" I declared hotly. "You don't realise what my life is here with you. It's all very well for you to live in the past, pondering over the dear departed glories of our family. But at my age one doesn't care twopence for an illustrious past. What one wants is something to do, and to be—and to enjoy—in the present! I don't see why it should be enough for me to remember that, even if I am poor, I am still Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter. It isn't enough! It's the most futile sort of existence in the whole world—living up to an old pedigree when you haven't even got money enough to buy yourself the right kind of shoes. You sneer at Million for being what you call nouveau-riche. It isn't half as humiliating and ridiculous as being what we are—nouveau-pauvre!"

"Beatrice, I think you have gone mad, to say such things."

"Do you? I haven't. I've been thinking them inside me for months—years," I told her violently. The oval mirror on the opposite side of the wall from that Gainsborough portrait of Lady Anastasia showed a queer picture; the picture of a tall, angular, grey-haired and aristocratic-looking spinster in steel-grey alpaca, coldly facing a small, rumpled-looking girl (myself) with the tense pose, the bright flush, and the clenched hands of anger. "And now I can't—I can't stand this sort of thing any longer——"

"May I ask what you intend to do?"

"To go!" I had only that instant thought of it. But once the words were out of my mouth I realised that it was the only thing in the world to do. Hadn't Million said so only this morning when she bade me good-bye? "You ought to clear out of this house.... You ought to have a fair old bust-up, Miss Beatrice. And then you ought to bunk!"

Well! "The fair old bust-up" I'd had, or was having. The next thing was "to bunk"!

Aunt Anastasia regarded me with cold eyes and a still more contemptuous curl of the lip.

"You will go, Beatrice? But how? To what?"

"To earn my own living——"

"What? There is nothing that you can do."

"I know," I admitted resentfully. "That's another grudge I have against our family. They never have had to 'come down into the market-place.' Consequently they wouldn't adapt themselves to the new conditions and fit themselves for the market now. They'd rather stand aside and vegetate in a mental backwater on twopence a year, thinking, 'We are still Lovelaces,' and learning nothing, nothing. Talk about 'The Idle Rich'! They are not such cucumbers of the ground as 'The Idle Poor'! I've been trained to nothing. Lots of the girls who live along this road have taken up typewriting, or County Council cookery, or teaching—things that will give them independence. I have nothing of the sort to fall back upon. I might take care of little children, perhaps, but people like Norland nurses at a hundred a year nowadays. Or I might find a post as a lady's maid——"

"What?"

"Well, you taught me to pack and to mend lace, Auntie! And I can do hair—it's the only natural gift I've got," I said. "Perhaps I might get them to give me a chance in some small hairdresser's to begin with."

"You are talking nonsense, and you do not even mean what you say, child."

"I mean every word of it, and I don't see why it should be nonsense," I persisted. "It isn't, when these other girls talk of making a career for themselves somehow. They can get on——"

"They are not ladies."

"It's a deadly handicap being what our family calls a lady," said I. "I'm going to stop being one and to have something like a life of my own at last."

"I forbid you," said Aunt Anastasia, in her stoniest voice, "I forbid you to do anything that is unbefitting my niece, my brother's child, and Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter!"

"Auntie, I am past twenty-one," I said quite quietly. "No one can 'forbid' my doing anything that is within the law! And I'm going to take the rest of my life into my own hands."

CHAPTER VII

MY DEPARTURE

I have been putting on all my outdoor things.

For I feel desperate.

And I must take advantage of this feeling. If I wait until to-morrow, when my rage and indignation and violent dissatisfaction with things-as-they-are have died down, and I'm normal again, well, then I shall get nothing done. I shall think: "Perhaps life here with Aunt Anastasia at No. 45 Laburnum Grove, isn't so bad after all, even if I do never have any parties or young friends or pretty frocks or anything that other happier, less-aristocratically connected girls look upon as a matter of course. Anyhow, there's nothing for it but to go on in the same humdrum fashion that I've been doing——"

Ah, no! I mustn't let myself go back to thinking like that again.

The secret of success is to get something done while you're in the mood for it!

In our hall with the unmended umbrella stand and the trophy of Afghan knives I was stopped by Aunt Anastasia.

"At least I insist upon knowing," she said, "where you are going now?"

I said, quite gently and amiably: "I am going to see Million."

"Million? The little object who was the servant here? Your taste in associates becomes more and more deplorable, Beatrice. You should not forget that even if she has happened to come into money"—my aunt spoke the very word as who should say "Dross!"—and concluded: "She is scarcely a person of whom you can make a friend."

"Million has always been a very staunch little friend of mine ever since she came here," I said, not without heat. "But I am going to this hostel of hers to ask her about something that has nothing to do with 'friendship.' You have her address. You know that it's a deadly respectable place. I expect I shall stay the night there, Aunt Anastasia. Good-bye." And off I went.

I was full of my new plan—a plan that seemed to have flashed full-blown into my brain while I was putting on my boots.

It had made me almost breathless with excitement and anticipation by the time I had rung the bell of the massive, maroon-painted door of the Kensington address and had said to the bored-looking man-servant who opened it: "May I see Miss Million, please?"

Such a plan it was as I had to unfold to her!

There was something odd and unfamiliar about the appearance of Million when she ran in to greet me in her new setting—the very Early Victorian, plushy, marble-mantelpieced, glass-cased drawing-room of the Ladies' Hostelry in Kensington.

What was the unfamiliar note? She wore her Sunday blouse of white Jap silk; her brown cloth skirt that dipped a little at the back. But what was it that made her look so strange? Ah! I knew. It was so funny to see our late maid-of-all-work in the house without a cap on!

This incongruous thought dashed through my mind as quickly as Million herself dashed over the crimson carpet towards me.

"Miss Beatrice! Lor'! Doesn't it seem ages since I seen you, and yet it's only this very morning since I left your aunt's. Well, this is a treat," she cried, holding out both of her little work-roughened hands. "It is nice, seein' some one you know, after the lot of old cats, and sketches, and freaks, and frosty-faces that live in this establishment!"

And the new heiress gave herself a little shake as she glanced round the spacious, gloomy apartment that we had for the moment to ourselves. Evidently Million found the Kensington "haven" recommended by her lawyer no change for the better from our Putney villa. Under the circumstances, and because of my plan, I felt rather glad of this.

I said: "Don't you like the place, then, Million? What are the people like?"

"Only one word to describe 'em, Miss Beatrice. Chronic. Fair give you ther hump. None of 'em married, except one, who's a colonel's widow, and thinks she's everybody, and all of 'em about eighty-in-the-shade. And spiteful! And nosey!" enlarged Million, as we sat down together on one of the massive red-plush covered sofas, under a large steel engraving of "Lord Byron and the Maid of Athens." She went on: "They wanted to know all about me, o' course. Watchin' me every bite I put into my mouth at table, and me so nervous that no wonder I helped myself to peas into me glass of water! Lookin' down their noses at me and mumbling to each other about me—not what I call very polite manners—and chance the ducks! I——"

Here the drawing-room door opened to admit one of the ladies, I suppose, of whom Million had been complaining. She wore a grey woolly shoulder-shawl and myrtle-green hair—I suppose something had gone wrong with the brown hair-restorer. And this lady gave one piercing glance at me and another at Million as she sidled towards a writing-table at the further end of the drawing-room and sat down with her back towards us. I'm sorry to say that Million twisted her small face into a perfectly horrible grimace and stuck out her tongue at the back. Then she, Million, lowered her voice as she chattered on about her new surroundings.

"Cry myself to sleep every night, I should, if I was to try to stay on here," she said. "Couldn't feel happy here, not if it was ever so! Oh, I'd rather go back to the Orphanage. Something of me own 'age' there, anyhow! Don't care if it is very tony and high-class and recommended. It's not my style.... I don't know where I'm going after, but, Miss Beatrice, I'm going to get out of this! I can't stay in a place that makes me feel as if I was in prison, so I'm going to hop it."

"That's just how I felt, Million. That's what I made up my mind to do," I told her. The new heiress gazed at me with all her bright grey eyes.

"What? You, Miss Beatrice? You don't mean——"

"That I'm not going on living at No. 45 Laburnum Grove!"

"What?" Million raised her voice incautiously, and the myrtle-green-haired lady glanced around. "Miss Nosey Parker," muttered Million, and then "Straight? You mean you've had a bust-up with your Aunt Nasturtium?"

"Rather," I nodded.

"About that young gentleman, I lay?" said Million. "Him from next door."

"How did you guess it was that? It was," I admitted. "He came to return this brooch of yours that you dropped on the 'bus—here it is—and my aunt chose to—to—to——"

"Oh, I know the way Miss Lovelace would 'choose'," said Million, with gusto. "So you left her, Miss Beatrice! So you done a flit at last, like I always been saying you did ought to do! You done it! Cheers! And now what are you thinking to do? Coming to me, are you?"

I smiled into the little affectionate rosy face that I was so accustomed to seeing under a white frilly cap with a black bow.

I said: "Yes, Million. I'm coming to you if you'll have me."

"Ow! That's the style, Miss——"

"If I come, you won't have to call me 'Miss' any more," I said firmly. "That'll be part of it."

"Part of what?" asked Million, bewildered.

"Part of the arrangement I want to make with you," I said. And then, looking up, I beheld curiosity written in every line of the back of that woman at the writing-table. I said: "Million, I can't talk to you here. Get your hat on and come out. We'll discuss this in the Park."

And in the Park, sitting side by side on two green wooden chairs, I unfolded to Million my suddenly conceived plan.

"Now, listen," I began. "You're a rich girl—a young woman with a big fortune of her own——"

"Oh, Miss, I don't seem to realise it one bit, yet——"

"You'll have to realise it. You'll have to begin and adapt yourself to it all, quite soon. And the sooner you begin the sooner you'll feel at home in it all."

"I don't feel as if I'd got a home, now," said Million, with the forlorn look coming over her face. "I don't feel as if I should ever make anything out of it—of this here being an heiress, I mean."

"Million, you'll have to 'make something of it'. Other people do. People who haven't been brought up to riches. It may not 'come natural' to them, at first. But they learn. They learn to live as if they'd always been accustomed to beautiful clothes, and to having houses, and cars, and all that sort of thing, galore. Million, these are the things you've got to acquire now you're rich," I said quite threateningly. "Even your dear old lawyer knew that this Kensington place was only 'pro tem'. You'll have to have an establishment, to settle where you'll live, and what you want to do with yourself."

"I don't want to do nothing, Miss Beatrice," said little Million helplessly.

"Don't talk nonsense. You know you told me yourself quite lately," I reminded her, "that you had one great wish."

Million's troubled little face lifted for a moment into a smile, but she shook her head (in that awful crimsony straw hat that she will wear "for best").

"You do remember that wish," I said. "You told me that you would so like to marry a gentleman. Well, now, here you will have every chance of meeting and marrying one!"

"Oh, Miss! But I'm reely—reely not the kind of girl that——"

"So you'll have to set to and make yourself into the kind of girl that the kind of 'gentleman' you'd like would be wild to marry. You'll have to——Well, to begin with," I said impressively, "you'll have to get a very good maid."

"Do you mean a girl to do the work about the house, Miss?"

"No, I don't. You'll have a whole staff of people to do that for you," I explained patiently. "I mean a personal maid, a lady's-maid. A person to do your hair and to marcel-wave, and to manicure, and to massage you! A person to take care of your beautiful clo——"

"Haven't got any beautiful clothes, Miss."

"You will have. Your maid will take care of that," I assured her. "She'll go with you to all the best shops and tell you what to buy. She'll see that you choose the right colours," I said, with a baleful glance at the crimson floppy hat disfiguring Million's little dark head. "She'll tell you how your things are to be made. She'll take care that you look like any other young lady with a good deal of money to spend, and some taste to spend it with. You don't want to look odd, Million, do you, or to make ridiculous mistakes when you go about to places where you'd meet——"

"Oh, Miss," said Million, blenching, "you know that if there is one thing I can't stick it's havin' to think people may be making game of me!"

"Well, the good maid would save you from that."

"I'd be afraid of her, then," protested Million.

I said: "No, you wouldn't. You've never been afraid of me."

"Ah," said Million, "but that's different. You aren't a lady's-maid——"

I said firmly a thing that made Million's jaw drop and her eyes nearly pop out of her head. I said: "I want to be a lady's-maid. I want to come to you as your maid—Miss Million's maid."

"Miss Bee—atrice! You're laughing."

"I'm perfectly serious," I said. "Here I am; I've left home, and I want to earn my own living. This is the only way I can do it. I can pack. I can mend. I can do hair. I have got 'The Sense of Clothes'—that is, I should have," I amended, glancing down at my own perfectly awful serge skirt, "if I had the chance of associating with anything worthy of the name of 'clothes.' And I know enough about people to help you in other ways. Million, I should be well worth the fifty or sixty pounds a year you'd pay me as wages."

"Me pay you wages?" little Million almost shrieked. "D'you mean it, Miss Beatrice?"

"I do."

"You mean for you, a young lady that's belonged to the highest gentry, with titles and what not, to come and work as lady's-maid to me, what's been maid-of-all-work at twenty-two pounds a year in your aunt's house?"

"Why not?"

"But, Miss—— It's so—so—Skew-wiff; too topsy-turvy, somehow, I mean," protested Million, the soldier's orphan, in tones of outrage.

I said: "Life's topsy-turvy. One class goes up in the world (that's your millionaire uncle and you, my dear), while another goes down (that's me and my aunts and uncles who used to have Lovelace Court). Won't you even give me a helping hand, Million? Won't you let me take this 'situation' that would be such a good way out of things for both of us? Aren't you going to engage me as your maid, Miss Million?"

And I waited really anxiously for her decision.

CHAPTER VIII

I BECOME MILLION'S MAID

The impossible has happened.

I am "Miss Million's maid."

I was taken on—or engaged, or whatever the right term is—a week ago yesterday.

I've surmounted all objections; the chief being Million—I mean "Miss Million"—herself. Her I have practically bullied into letting her ex-mistress come and work for her. After much talk and many protests, I said, finally, "Million, you've got to."

And Million finally said: "Very well, Miss Beatrice, if you will 'ave it so, 'ave it so you will. It don't seem right to me, but——"

Then there was my Aunt Anastasia, the controller of my destiny up to now. Her I wrote to from that hostelry in Kensington, which was Million's first "move" from No. 45, the Putney villa. And from Aunt Anastasia I received a letter of many sheets in length.

Here are a few of the more plum-like extracts:

"When I received the communication of your insane plan, Beatrice, I was forced to retire to the privacy of my own apartment"—

(Not so very "private," when the walls are so thin that she can hear the girls in the adjoining room at No. 46 rustling the tissue-paper of the box under the bed that they keep their nicest hats in!)

"and to take no fewer than five aspirins before I was able to review the situation with any measure of calm."

Then—

"It is well that my poor brother, your father, is not here to see to what depths his only child has descended, and to what a milieu!"

(The "descent" being from that potty little row of packing-cases in Putney to the Hotel Cecil, where I am engaging a suite of rooms for Miss Million and her maid to-morrow!)

"Your dear great-grandmother, Lady Anastasia, would turn in her grave, did she ever dream that a Miss Lovelace, a descendant of the Lovelaces of Lovelace Court," etc., etc.

(But I am not a Lovelace now. I have told Million—I mean, I have requested my new employer—to call me "Smith." Nice, good, old, useful-sounding sort of name. And more appropriate to my present station!)

Then my aunt writes:

"Your fondness for associating with young men of the bounder class over garden walls and on doorsteps was already a sufficiently severe shock to me. As that particular young man appears to be still about here, poisoning the air of the garden with his tobacco smoke and obviously gazing through the trellis in search of you each evening, I suppose I must acquit him of any complicity in your actions."

(I suppose that nice-looking young man at No. 44 has been wondering when I was going to finish giving him Million's address to return that brooch.)

There's miles more of Auntie's letter. It ends up with a majestically tearful supplication to me to return to my own kith and kin (meaning herself and the Gainsborough portrait!) and to remember who I am.

Nothing will induce me to do so! I've felt another creature since I left No. 45, with the bamboo furniture and the heirlooms. And, oh, what fun I'm going to have over forgetting who I was. Hurray for the new life of liberty and fresh experiences as Miss Million's maid!

The first thing to do, of course, is to provide ourselves with means to go about, to shop, to arrange the preliminaries of our adventure! That five pounds which Mr. Chesterton advanced to his new client (smiling as he did so) will not do more than pay our bill at the Home for Independent Cats, as Million calls this Kensington place.

Mr. Chesterton not only smiled, he laughed outright when we presented ourselves at the Chancery Lane office together once more. I was again spokeswoman and I came to the point at once.

"We want some more money, please."

"Not an uncommon complaint," said the old lawyer. "But, pardon me, I have no money of yours! You mean Miss Million wants some more money?"

I hope he doesn't think I'm a parasite of a girl who clings on to little Million because she's happened to inherit a fortune. Rather angrily I said: "We both want it; because until Miss Million has some more she cannot pay me my salary!"

He looked a little amazed at this, but he did not say anything about his surprise that I was in a salaried capacity to my little friend. He only said: "Well! How much do you—and Miss Million—want? Five pounds again? Five hundred——"

"Oh, not five hundred all at once," gasped the awe-struck Million; "I'd never feel I could go to sleep with it——"

While I cut in abruptly: "Yes, five hundred will do for us to arrange ourselves on."

Thereupon the old lawyer made the suggestion that was to be fraught with such odd consequences.

"Wouldn't it be more convenient," he said, "if an account could be opened in Miss Million's name at a bank?"

"That will do," said Miss Million's maid (myself), while Miss Million gazed round upon the black dispatch-boxes of the office.

Ten minutes later, with a cheque for £500 clutched tightly in Miss Million's hand, also a letter from Mr. Chesterton to Mr. Reginald Brace, the manager, we found ourselves at the bank near Ludgate Circus that Mr. Chesterton had recommended.

Million was once more doddering with nervousness. Once more Miss Million's new maid had to take it all upon herself.

"Mr. Brace," I demanded boldly over the shoulder of an errand-lad who was handing in slips of paper with small red stamps upon them.

One moment later and we were ushered into the manager's private room.

Yet another second, and that room seemed echoing with Million's gleeful shriek of "Why! Miss Beatrice! See who it is? If it isn't the gent from next door!"

She meant the manager.

I looked up and faced the astonished blue eyes in his nice sunburnt face.

Yes! It was the young man from No. 44 Laburnum Grove; "the insufferable young bounder" on whose account I had got into those "rows" with Aunt Anastasia. So this was Mr. Reginald Brace, the bank manager! This was where he took the silk hat I'd seen disappearing down the grove each morning at 9.30.

He recognised us. All three of us laughed! He was the first to be grave. Indeed, he was suddenly alarmingly formal and ceremonious as he asked us to sit down and opened Mr. Chesterton's letter.

I couldn't help watching his face as he read it, to enjoy the look of blank amazement that I thought would appear there when he found that the little maid-servant he had noticed at the kitchen window of the next-door villa to his own should be the young lady about whom he had received this lawyer's letter.

No look of amazement appeared. You might just as well have expected a marble mantelpiece to look surprised that the chimney was smoking.

He said presently: "I shall be delighted to do as Mr. Chesterton asks."

Then came a lot of business with the introduction of the chief cashier, with a pass-book, a paying-in-book, a cheque-book, and a big book for Million's name and address (which she gave care of Josiah Chesterton, Esq.). Then, when the cashier man had gone out again, Mr. Brace's marble-mantelpiece manner vanished also. He smiled in a way that seemed to admit that he did remember there were such things as garden-hoses and infuriated aunts in the world. But he didn't seem to remember that it was not my business, but Million's, that had brought us there. For it was to me that he turned as he said in that pleasant voice of his: "Well! This does seem rather a long way round to a short way home, doesn't it?"

At that there came into my mind again the plan I had for Million's benefit. Million should have her wish. She should marry "the sort of young gentleman she'd always thought of." I would bring these two together—the good-looking, young, pleasant-voiced bank manager and the little shy heiress, who would be extremely pretty and attractive by the time I'd been her maid for a month.

So I said: "You know, Miss Million's 'home' is no longer at No. 45 in your road."

He said: "She seems to have some very good friends there, though."

Here the artless Million broke in: "Not me, sir! I never could bear that aunt of hers," with a nod at me, "and no more couldn't Miss Beatrice, after I left!"

I tried to nudge Million, but could scarcely do so just under that young man's interested blue eye. He looked up quickly to me. "Then you have left?"

I smiled and nodded vaguely, and we sat for a moment in silence, the tall, morning-coated young manager, and the two girls still so shabbily dressed, that you wouldn't have dreamt of connecting either of us with millions. I wasn't going to let him into the situation of mistress and maid just then. But I condescended to inform him: "Miss Million will be at the Hotel Cecil after to-morrow."

He flashed me one brief, blue glance. I wondered if he guessed I'd a plan in my mind. Anyhow, he fell in with it. For, as he shook hands for good-bye with both of us, he said to Million: "Will you allow me to call on you there?"

Million, looking overjoyed but flustered, turned to me. Evidently I was to answer again.

I said sedately: "I am sure Miss Million will be glad to let you call."

"When?" said the young bank manager rather peremptorily.

I made a rapid mental calculation. I ought to be able to get Million suitably clad for receiving admirers-to-be in about—yes, four days.

I said: "On Thursday afternoon, at about five, if that suits you."

"Admirably," said the young man whom I have selected to marry Million. "Au revoir!"

CHAPTER IX

WE MOVE INTO NEW QUARTERS

The Hotel Cecil, June, 1914.

I've taken the first step towards setting up my new employer, Miss Million, as a young lady of fortune.

That first step was—new luggage!

New clothes we could do without for a little longer (though not for much longer. I'm quite firm about that).

But new, expensive-looking trunks Miss Million must have. It would be absolutely impossible for "Miss Million and Maid" to make their appearance at a big London hotel with the baggage which had witnessed their exit from the Putney villa. My brown canvas hold-all and her tin trunk with the rope about it—what did they make us look like? Irish emigrants!

"Nice luggage is the mark of a lady," was one of my Aunt Anastasia's many maxims.

So we spent the morning in Bond Street, buying recklessly and wildly at Vuitton's and at that place where you get the "Innovation" trunks that look like a glorified wardrobe—all hangers and drawers. I did all the ordering. Million stood by and looked like a scared kitten. When the time came she signed the cheques and gasped, "Lor', Miss!"

"Million, you're not to say 'Lor''," I ordered her in a stage whisper.

I turned away from the polished shop assistants who, I should think, must have had the morning of their lives. I wonder what they made of their customers, the two young women (one with a strong Cockney accent) who dressed as if from a country rectory jumble sale and who purchased trunks as if for a duchess's trousseau?

"And you are not to say 'Miss.' Do remember, Million," I urged her. "Now we'll have a taxi. Two taxis, I mean."

One taxi was piled high with the new and princely pile of "leather goods." Hat-boxes, dress-baskets, two Innovation trunks, a week-end bag, and a dressing-case with crystal and ivory fittings. The other taxi bore off the small, "my-Sunday-out"-looking figure of Miss Million and the equally small, almost equally badly dressed figure of Miss Million's maid.

We drove first to the Kensington Hostelry and picked up the old luggage. By the side of the new it looked not even as respectable as an Irish emigrant's; it looked like some Kentish hop-picker's! We made the driver unstrap and open one of the large new dress-baskets. And into this we dumped the hold-all and the tin trunk that seemed to be labelled "My First Place." Then I ordered him to drive to the Hotel Cecil, and off we whirled again.

Our arrival at the Cecil was marked by quite a dramatic little picture; like something on the stage, I thought.

For as our taxi swept around the big circle of the courtyard of the hotel, as it glided up exactly opposite the middle door and a couple of gorgeously uniformed commissionaires stepped forward, the air was rent by the long, piercingly shrill notes of a posthorn. There was the staccato clatter of horses' hoofs, and there rattled and jingled up to the entrance a coach of lemon-yellow-and-black, with four magnificent white horses, driven by a very big and strongly built, ruddy-faced, white-toothed young man, wearing a tall white hat, a black-and-white check suit, yellow gloves, a hunting tie with a black pearl pin in it, and one large red rose.

This gay and startling apparition took our eyes and our attention off everything else for a moment. Million's grey eyes were indeed popping out of her head like hat-pegs as the young man leapt lightly down from the coach. She was staring undisguisedly at him. And I saw him turn and give one very hard, straight glance—not at Million—not at me. His eyes, which were very blue and bright, were all for that taxi full of very imposing-looking new luggage just behind us. Then he turned to his friends on the coach; several other young men, also dressed like Solomon in all his glory, and a couple of ladies, very powdery, with cobalt-blue eyelashes, and smothers of golden hair, and pretty frocks that looked as if they'd got into them with the shoehorn. (I don't think skirts can possibly get any tighter than they are at this present moment of June, 1914, unless we take to wearing one on each leg.)

All these people were laughing and talking together very loudly and calling out Christian names. "Jim!" and "Sunny Jim!" seemed to be the big young man who had driven them up. Then they all trooped off towards the Palm Court, calling out something about "Rattlesnake cocktails"—and Million and I came back with a start to our own business.

A huge porter came along to take our luggage off the cab. He put a tremendous amount of force into hoisting one of the dress-baskets. It went up like a feather. The empty one! I do wonder what he thought....

We went into the Central Hall, crowded with people. (Note.—I must teach Million to learn to walk in front of me; she will sidle after me everywhere like a worm that doesn't know how to turn.) We marched up to the bureau. The man on the other side of the counter pushed the big book towards me.

"Will you sign the register, please."

"Yes—no. I mean it isn't me." I drew back and pinched my employer's arm. "You sign here, please, Miss Million," I said very distinctly.

And Million, breathing hard and flushing crimson, came forward, leant over the book, and slowly wrote in her Soldiers' Orphanage copybook hand, with downstrokes heavy and upstrokes light:

"Nellie Mary Million" (just as it had been written on her insurance-card).

"Miss," I dictated in a whisper, "Miss Nellie Mary Million and maid."

"'Ow, Miss, don't you write your name?" breathed Million gustily. "Miss——"

I trod on her foot. I saw several American visitors staring at us.

The man said: "Your rooms are forty-five, forty-six, and forty-seven, Miss."

"Forty-five. Ow! Same number as at home," murmured Million. "Will you please tell me how we get?"

It was one of the chocolate-liveried page-boys who showed us to our rooms—the two large, luxuriously furnished bedrooms and the sitting-room that seemed so extraordinarily palatial to eyes still accustomed to the proportions of No. 45 Laburnum Grove.

What a change! What other extraordinary changes and contrasts lie before us, I wonder?

We were closely followed by the newly bought trunks; one filled with ancient baggage, like a large and beautiful nut showing a shrivelled kernel; the others an empty magnificence. Million and I gazed upon them as they stood among the white-painted hotel furniture, filling the big room with the fragrance of costly leather.

Million said: "Well! I shall never get enough things to fill all them, I don't s'pose."

"Won't you!" I said. "We go shopping again this very afternoon; shopping clothes! And the question is whether we've got enough boxes to hold them!"

"Miss!" breathed Million.

I turned from the tray, full of attractively arranged little boxes and shelves, of the dress-basket. Quite sharply I said: "How often am I to tell you not to call me that?"

"Very sorry, Miss Beatrice. I mean—S—Smith!" faltered Million. Her pretty grey eyes were full of tears. Her small, bonnie face looked suddenly pinched and pale. She sat down with a dump on the edge of the big brass bedstead. Very forlorn, she looked, the little heiress.

"Sorry I was cross," I said penitently, patting my employer's hand.

"It's not that, Miss," said Million, relapsing again, "it's only—oh, haven't you got a sinkin'? I feel fair famished, I do; indeed, what with all the going about, and——"

"I'm awfully hungry, too," I admitted. "We'll go down to the dining-room at once. Come along. You go first. You are to!"

"Not to the dining-room here," objected Million, terrified. "Not in this grand place, with all these people. Oh, Miss, did you notice that young gentleman, him with the red rose, and all the ladies in their lovely dresses? I'd far rather just nip out and get a portion of steak-and-kidney pie and a nice cupper tea at an A.B.C. There is bound to be one close by here——"

"Well, we aren't going to it," I decreed firmly. "Ladies with private incomes of a hundred and fifty pounds a week don't lunch at marble-topped tables. Anyhow, their maids won't. But if you don't want to have luncheon here the first day, perhaps——"

"I don't; oh, not me. I couldn't get anything down, I know I couldn't, and all these people dressed up so grand, looking at me! (Did you see her with the cerise feather in her hat that the young gentleman called 'facie'?) Oh, lor'!" The grey eyes filled again.

So I made a compromise and said we would lunch out somewhere else; a good restaurant was near, where you do at least get a table-cloth. In the hall we saw again the young man who had driven up in the four-in-hand. He was talking to one of the porters, and his broad, black-and-white check back was towards us. I heard what he was saying, in a deep voice with a soft burr of Irish brogue in it—

"—with all those lashins of new trunks?... Million?... Will she have anything to do with the Chicago Million, the Sausage King, as they call him?"

"I don't know, sir," said the porter.

"Find out for me, will you?" said the four-in-hand young man.

Then he turned round and saw me (again followed by my sidling employer) making my way towards the entrance.

He raised his hat in a rather empresse manner as he allowed us to pass.

"Oh, Miss—I mean, oh, Smith! Isn't he handsome?" breathed Million as we got out into the Strand. "Did you notice what a lovely smile he'd got?"

I said rather chillingly: "I didn't very much like the look of him."

And I'm going to try and stop Million from liking the look of that sort of young man. Fortune-hunters, beware!

CHAPTER X

AN ORGY OF SHOPPING!

Oh, what an afternoon we've had!

Talk about "one crowded hour of glorious life." Well, Million and I have had from two to six; that is, four crowded glorious hours of shopping! I scarcely know where we've been, except that they were all the most expensive places. Any woman who reads this story will understand me when I say I made a bee-line for those shops that don't put very much in the show-window.

Just one perfect gown on a stand, perhaps, one filmy dream of a lingerie blouse, a pair of silk stockings that looked as if they'd been fashioned by the fairies out of spun sunset, and a French girl's name splashed in bold white letters across the pane—that was the sort of decoration of the establishments patronised by Miss Million and her maid.

As before, the maid (myself) had to do all the ordering, while the heiress shrank and slunk and cowered in the background. For poor little Million was really too overawed for words by those supercilious and slim young duchesses in black satin, the shop assistants who glided towards us with a haughty "What may I show you, Moddom?" From "undies" (all silk) to corsets (supple perfection!), through ready-made costumes to afternoon frocks and blouses and hats and evening-gowns I made my relentless way.

After the first few gasps from Million of "Oh, far too expensive.... Oh, Miss!... Haven't they any cheaper than.... Twenty? Lor'! Does she mean twenty shillings, Miss Beatrice? What! Twenty pounds? Oh, we can't——" I left off asking the prices of things. I simply selected the garments or the hats that looked the sweetest and harmonised the best with my new employer's black hair and bright grey frightened eyes. I heard myself saying with a new note of authority in my voice: "Yes! That'll do. And the little shoes to match. And two dozen of these. And put that with the others. I will have them all sent together." What did money matter, when it came to ordering an outfit for a millionairess?

I grew positively intoxicated with the mad joy of choosing clothes under these conditions. Isn't it the day-dream of every human being who wears a skirt? Isn't it "what every woman wants?" A free hand for a trousseau of all new things! To choose the most desirable, to materialise every vision she's ever had of the Perfect Hat, the Blouse of Blouses, and to think "never mind what it costs!"

And this, at last, had fallen to my lot. I quite forgot that I was not the millionairess for whom all this many-coloured and soft perfection was to be sent "home"—"to the Hotel Cecil, I'll trouble you." I only remembered that I was the millionairess's maid when one of the black-satin duchesses, in the smartest hat shop, informed me that I "could perfectly wear" the little Viennese hat with the flight of jewelled humming-birds, and I had had to inform her that the hat was intended for "the other lady."

"We'll do a little shopping for me, now," I decided, when we left that hat-shop divinity with three new creations to pack up for Miss Million at the Cecil. I said: "I'm tired of people not knowing exactly what I am. I'm going to choose a really 'finished' kit for a superior lady's-maid, so that everybody shall recognise my 'walk in life' at the first glance!"

"Miss! Oh, Miss Beatrice, you can't," protested Million, in shocked tones. "You're never going to wear—livery, like?"

"I am," I declared. "A plain black gown, very perfectly cut, an exquisite muslin apron with a little bib, and a cap like——"

"Miss! You can't wear a cap," declared little Million, standing stock still at the top of Bond Street and gazing at me as if I had planned the subversion of all law and order and fitness. "All very well for you to come and help me, as you might say, just to oblige, and to be a sort of companion to me and to call yourself my maid. But I never, never bargained for you, Miss Beatrice, to go about wearing no caps! Why, there's plenty of young girls in my own walk of life—I mean in what used to be my own walk! Plenty of young girls who wouldn't dream of being found drowned in such a thing as a cap! Looks so menial, they said. Several of the girls at the Orphanage said they'd never put such a thing on their heads once they got away. And a lady's-maid, well, 'tisn't even the same as a parlour-maid! And you with such a nice head of hair of your own, Miss Beatrice!" Million expostulated with almost tearful incoherence. "A reel lady's-maid isn't required to wear a cap, even if she does slip on an apron!"

"You shut up," I gaily commanded the employer upon whom I now depend for my daily bread. "I am going to wear a cap. And to look rather sweet in it."

And I did.

For when I'd spent the two quarters' salary that I'd ordered Million to advance to me, I looked at myself in a long glass at the establishment where they seem particularly great on "small stock sizes"—my size. I beheld myself a completely different shape from the lumpy little bunch of a girl that I'd been in blue serge that seemed specially designed to hide every decent line of her figure. I was really quite as graceful as the portrait of Lady Anastasia herself! This was thanks to the beautifully built, severely simple gown, fitted on over a pair of low-cut, glove-like, elastic French stays. The dead-black of it showed up my long, slim throat (my one inheritance from my great-grandmother!), which seemed as white as the small, impertinently befrilled apron that I tied about my waist. The cap was just a white butterfly perched upon the bright chestnut waves of my hair.

And the general effect of Miss Million's maid at that moment was of something rather pretty and fetching in the stage-lady's maid line, from behind the footlights at Daly's. I'm sorry to have to blow my own trumpet like this, but after all it was the first time I'd ever seen myself look so really nice. I thought it was quite a pity that there was no one but Million and the girl in the "maids' caps department" to admire me! Then, for some funny, unexplained reason, I thought of somebody else who might possibly catch a glimpse of me looking like this. I thought of the blue-eyed, tall, blonde manager of the bank where Million has opened her account; Mr. Reginald Brace, who lives next door to where we used to live; the honest, pleasant-voiced person whom I look upon as such a good match for Million; the young man who's arranged to come and have tea with her at her hotel next Thursday.

He will be the very first caller she's had since she ceased to be little Nellie Million, the maid-of-all-work.

CHAPTER XI

AN OLD FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

I was wrong.

She will have another caller first.

In fact, she has had another caller. When we got back to our—I really must remember to say her—rooms at the Cecil we were met, even as I unlocked the door, by a whiff of wonderful perfume, heady, intoxicating. The scent of carnations. A great sheaf of the flowers was laid on the table near the window. Red carnations, Carmen's carnations, the flowers that always seem to me to stand for something thrilling.... In the language of flowers it is "a red rose" that spells the eternal phrase, "I love you." But how much more appropriate would be one handful of the jagged petals of my favourite blood-red carnations!

"Lor'! Ain't these beauties!" cried Million, sniffing rapturously. "Talk about doin' things in style! Well, it's a pretty classy kind of hotel where they gives you cut flowers like this for your table decorations."

"My dear Million, you don't suppose the hotel provided these carnations," I laughed, "as it provided the palms downstairs?"

"Lor'! Do I pay more money for 'em, then, Miss—Smith, I mean?"

"Pay? Nonsense. The flowers have been sent in by some one," I said.

"Sent? Who'd ever send flowers to me?"

I thought I could guess. I considered it a very pretty attention of Mr. Reginald Brace, Million's only new friend so far, the young bank manager.

I said: "Look and see; isn't there a note with the flowers?"

Million took up the fragrant sheaf. Something white was tucked in among the deep red blooms.

"There is a card," she said. She took it out, and glanced at it. I heard her exclaim in a startled voice: "Lor'! Who may he be when he's at home?"

I looked up quickly.

"What?" I said. "Don't you remember who Mr. Brace is?"

"I remember Mr. Brace all right, Miss—Smith, I mean. But these here ain't from no Mr. Brace," said Million, in a voice of amazement. "Look at the card!"

I took the card and read it.

On one side was:

"To Miss Million, with kindest greetings from an old friend of the family!"

On the other side was the name:

"The Honourable James Burke, Ballyneck, Ireland."

"The Honourable!" echoed Million, breathing heavily on the H in "honourable." "Now who in the wide world is the gentleman called all that, who thinks he's a friend of my family (and one that hasn't any family), whoever's he?"

"It's very mysterious," I agreed, staring from the flowers to the card.

"Must be some mistake!" said Million.

An idea occurred to me.

"Ring the bell, Million," I said. Then, remembering my place, I crossed the room and rung the bell myself.

"For the chamber-maid. She may be able to tell us something about this," I explained. "We'll ask her."

More surprises!

The rather prim-faced and middle-aged chamber-maid who appeared in answer to our summons had a startling announcement to make in answer to my query as to who was responsible for that sheaf of glorious carnations that we had found waiting.

"The flowers, Madam, yes. Mr. Burke gave them to me himself with orders that they were to be placed in Miss Million's room."

"Yes," I answered for Miss Million; "but who is this Mr. Burke? That is what we—I mean that is what Miss Million wants to know."

The sandy eyebrows of the chamber-maid rose to the top of her forehead as she replied: "Mr. Burke? I understood, Madam, that——" Then she stopped and began again: "Mr. Burke is staying in the hotel just now, Madam."

A sudden presentiment chilled me. I glanced from the small, ill-clad figure of the new heiress sitting at the table with her carnations, through the open door into her bedroom with the pyramidal new trunks which had attracted their full share of glances this morning!

Then I looked back to the chamber-maid standing there so deferentially in front of the two worst-dressed people at the Cecil. And I said quickly: "Is he—is Mr. Burke the man who drove up in the four-in-hand this morning?"

"Yes, Madam. A black-and-yellow coach with four white horses; that would be Mr. Burke's party."

"Lor'!" broke for the fiftieth time this day from the lips of Million. "That young gentleman with all those grand people, and the trumpet" (this was the posthorn), "and what not? Him with the red rose in his buttonhole?" Million was as red as that rose in her flattered excitement, as she spoke. "Well, I never! Did you ever, Miss—er—Smith! Did you ever? Sending me in these beautiful flowers and all. Whatever made him think he knew me?"

"I can't say, Madam," took up the chamber-maid, "but I certainly understood from Mr. Burke that he knew your family—in the States, I think he said."

"Would that be me uncle that I got my money from?" murmured the artless Million to me.

I thought of the confab that I'd overheard in the central hall between the hotel porter and that loudly dressed young man who had raised his hat as we passed. It had been ascertained for him, then, that Miss Million and "The Sausage King" had something to do with each other! Awful young man! Million, looking visibly overcome, murmured: "Fancy dad's own brother having such classy friends out there! A Honourable! Doesn't that mean being relations with some duke or earl?"

"Mr. Burke is the second son of Lord Ballyneck, an Irish peer, I believe, Madam," the chamber-maid informed us—or rather me. I wish all these people wouldn't turn to me always, ignoring the real head of affairs, Million. Never mind. Wait until I've got her into her new gowns, and myself into the cap and apron! There'll be a difference then!

The chamber-maid added: "Mr. Burke left a message for Miss Million."

"A message——"

"Yes, Madam; he said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon you to-morrow afternoon here at about four o'clock, to have a talk about mutual friends. I said that I would let Miss Million know."

"Glory!" ejaculated Million, as the chamber-maid withdrew. "Jer hear that, Miss Beatrice?"

"I hear you calling me by my wrong name again," I said severely.

"Smith, I mean! D'you take it in that we're going to have that young gentleman coming calling here to-morrow to see us? Oh, lor'! I shall be too nervous to open my mouth, I know.... Which of me new dresses d'you think I'd better put on, M—Smith? Better be the very grandest I got, didn't it? Oh! I shall go trembly all over when I see him again close to, I know I shall," babbled Million, starry-eyed with excitement. "Didn't I ought to drop him a line to thank him for them lovely flowers and to say I shall be so pleased to see him?"

"Certainly not!" I said firmly. "In the first place, I don't think you ought to see him at all." Million gaped at me.

"Not see——But he's coming here to call!"

My voice sounded as severe as Aunt Anastasia's own as I returned: "I don't think he seemed a very desirable sort of visitor."

"Not——But, Miss, dear, you heard what the maid said. He's a Honourable!"

"I don't care if he's a Serene Highness. I didn't like the look of him."

"I thought he looked lovely!" protested the little heiress, gazing half-timidly, half-reproachfully upon me. "Look at the beautiful kind smile he'd got, and so good-lookin'! And even if he wasn't a lord's son, you could see at a glance that he was a perfect gentleman, used to every luxury!"

"Yes, I daresay," I began. "But—well! I don't know how to explain why I don't think we—you ought to get to know him, Million. But I don't. For one thing, I heard him making inquiries about you as we went through this afternoon. I heard him tell the hall porter to find out if you had anything to do with Mr. Million, of Chicago!"

"Very natural kind of remark to pass," said little Million. "Seeing new people come in, and knowing uncle's name. It's because of uncle, you see, that he wants to make friends."

"Because of uncle's money!" I blurted out rather brutally.

"Oh, Miss—oh, Smith!" protested Million, all reproachful eyes. "What would he want with more money, a young gentleman like that? He's got no end of his own."

"How do you know?"

"But—w'y! Look at him!" cried Million. "Look at his clothes! Look at that lovely coach an' those horses——"

"Very likely not his own," I said, shaking my head at her. "My dear Million—for goodness' sake remind me to practise calling you 'Miss'; I'm always reminding you to practise not calling me it! My dear Miss Million, I feel in all my bones one sad presentiment. That young man is a fortune-hunter. I saw it in his bold and sea-blue eye. As it says in the advertisement, 'It's your money he wants.' I believe he's the sort of person who makes up to any one with money. (I expect all those other men he was with were rich enough.) And I don't think you ought to make friends with this Mr. Burke until we've heard a little more about him. Certainly I don't think you ought to let him come and see you here without further preliminaries to-morrow afternoon!"

"What am I goin' to do about it, then?" asked Million in a small voice.

Her mouth drooped. Her grey eyes gazed anxiously at me, to whom she now turns as her only guide, philosopher, and friend. She was evidently amazed that I didn't share her impressions of this "lovely" young "Honourable." She had wanted to see him "close to"—a fearful joy! She had meant to dress up in her grandest new finery for the occasion. And now she was woefully disappointed.

Poor little soul!

Yes; evidently her eyes had already been dazzled by that vision this morning outside the Cecil; that gay picture that had looked like some brightly coloured smoking-room print. The brilliant, lemon-yellow-and-black coach, the postilion behind, the spanking white horses, the handsome, big, ruddy-faced young sportsman who was driving....

But it was my duty to see that only her eyes were caught. Not her heart—as it probably would be if she saw much more of that very showy young rake! And not her fortune.

I said, feeling suddenly more grown-up and sensible than I've ever been in my life: "You will have to leave word that you are not at home to-morrow afternoon."

"Very well, Miss Smith," said my employer blankly. She sat for a minute silent in the hotel easy-chair, holding the carnations. Then her small, disappointed face lighted up a little.

"But I shall be at home," she reminded me, with a note of hope in her tone. "Got to be. It's Thursday to-morrow."

"What about that?" I said, wondering if Million were again harking back to the rules of her previous existence. Thursday is my Aunt Anastasia's "day" for the stair-rods and the fenders, and the whole of No. 45 is wont to reek with Brasso. Could Million have meant——

No.

She took up: "Don't you remember? Thursday afternoon was when that other young gentleman was going to drop in. Him from the bank. That Mr. Brace. He'll be coming. You said he might."

"So he is," I said. "But that won't make any difference. You'll be 'at home' to him. Not to Mr. Burke. That's all."

"I can't be in two places at once, and they're both coming at four," argued the artless Million. "How can I say I'm not at home, when——"

"Oh, Million! It just shows you never could have been in service in very exalted situations," I laughed. "Don't you know that 'not at home' simply means you don't wish to see that particular visitor?"

Little Million's whole face was eloquent of the retort. "But I do wish to see him!" She did not say it. She gave a very hard sniff at the carnations in her hand, and suggested diffidently and rather shakily: "P'raps Mr. Brace might have liked to see another gentleman here? More company for him."

I paused before I answered.

A sudden thought had struck me.

Men are supposed to be so much better at summing up other men's characters at a glance than women are.

In spite of what Aunt Anastasia has said about "insufferable young bounders," I believe that this Mr. Reginald Brace is a thoroughly nice, clear-sighted sort of young man. I feel that one could rely upon his judgment of people. I'm sure that one could trust him to be sincere and fair.

Why not consult him about this new, would-be friend of Million's?

Why not be guided by him? He was the only available man I could be guided by, after all.

So I said: "Well, Million, on second thoughts, of course, if you have another man here, it isn't quite the same thing as receiving this Mr. Burke by himself. It puts him on a different footing. And——"

"D'you mean I may have him here after all, Miss?" cried Million, lighting up again at once. "Mr. Burke, I mean."

"Oh, yes, have him," I said resignedly. "Have both of them. We'll see what happens when they meet."

CHAPTER XII

THE DAY OF THE PARTY

To-day's the day!

At four o'clock those two young men are coming to the Hotel Cecil, where for the first time it will be a case of "Miss Million at home."

And to begin with Miss Million and her maid have had quite a fierce argument.

I knew it was coming. I scented it afar off as soon as Million had sent off her formal little note (dictated by me) to the Hon. James Burke at this hotel.

As soon as we had settled which of all her new gowns the little hostess was going to wear for this event she turned to me. Obviously suppressing the "Miss Beatrice," which still lingers on the tip of her tongue, Million asked: "And what are you goin' to put on?"

"Put on?" I echoed with well-simulated surprise, for I knew perfectly what she meant. I braced myself to be firm, and took the bull by the horns.

"I shan't have to 'put on' anything, you see," I explained. "I shall always be just as I am in this black frock and this darling little frilly apron, and the cap that I really love myself in. You can't say it doesn't suit me, Mill——, Miss Million."

The scandalised Million stared at me as we stood there in her hotel bedroom; a sturdy, trim little dark-haired figure in her new princesse petticoat that showed her firmly developed, short arms, helping me to put away the drifts of superfluous tissue-paper that had enwrapped her trousseau. I myself had never been so well dressed as in this dainty black-and-white livery.

She exclaimed in tones of horror: "But you can't sit down to afternoon tea with two young gentlemen in your cap and apron!"

"Of course not. I shan't be sitting down with them at all."

"What?"

"I shan't be having tea with you in the drawing-room," I explained. "Naturally I shall not appear this afternoon."

"Wha—what'll you do, then?"

"What does a good lady's-maid do? Sit in her bedroom, sorting her mistress's new lingerie and sewing name-tapes on to her mistress's silk stockings——"

"What! And leave me alone, here?" remonstrated my mistress shrilly. "Me sit here by myself with those two young gentlemen, one of them a Honourable and a perfect stranger to me, and me too nervous to so much as ask them if they like one lump or two in their cups of tea? Oh, no! I couldn't do it——"

"You'll have to," I said. "Ladies'-maids do not entertain visitors with their employers."

"But——'Tisn't as if I was an ordinary employer! 'Tisn't as if you was an ordinary lady's-maid!"

"Yes, it is, exactly."

"But—they'll know you aren't. Why, that young Mr. Reginald Brace, him from the bank, he knows as well as you do who you are at home!"

"That has nothing to do with him, or with your tea-party."

"I don't want no tea-party if I'm goin' to be left all on me own, and nobody to help me talk to that Honourable," Million protested almost tearfully. "Lor'! If I'd a known, I'd never have said the gentlemen could come!"

"Nonsense," I laughed. "You'll enjoy it."

"'Enjoy!' Oh, Miss—Smith! Enjoyment and me looks as if we was going to be strangers," declared Million bitterly. "I don't see why you couldn't oblige a friend, and come in to keep the ball a-rollin', you that know the go of Society, and that!"

"I'm sure it's not the go of Society to have in the lady's-maid to help amuse the visitors. Not in the drawing-room, at all events."

"But if I ask you——"

"If you ask me to do things that are 'not my place,' Miss Million," I said firmly, "I shall give you notice. I mean it."

This awful threat had its effect.

Million heaved one more gusty sigh, cast one more reproachful glance at her rebellious maid, and dropped the subject.

Thank goodness!

I shall miss this weird and unparalleled party, but I shall hear all about it at second-hand after that amazingly contrasted couple of young men has departed.

It's ten minutes to four now.

I have "set the scene" perfectly for this afternoon's festivity. A hotel sitting-room can never look like a home room. But I've done my best with flowers, and new cushions, and a few pretty fashion journals littered about; also several new novels that I made Million buy, because I simply must read them. Yes, I've arranged the room. I've arranged the carnations. (I hope Mr. Burke will think they look nice.) I've arranged the tea; dainty Nile-green cakes from Gunter's, and chocolates and cigarettes. I've arranged the trembling little hostess.

"Good-bye, Miss Million," I said firmly, as I prepared to depart. "You needn't be nervous; you look very nice in the white French muslin with the broad grey-blue ribbon to match your best feature, your eyes. Very successful."

"Looks so plain, to me," objected little Million unhappily. "You might have let me put on something more elabyrinth. Nobody'd ever believe I'd been and gone and given as much as fifteen guineas for this thing."

"Anybody would know, who knew anything," I consoled her. "And I'll tell you one thing. A man like Mr. Burke knows everything. Give him my love—no. Mind you don't!"

"I shall be too scared to say a word to him," began Million, whimpering. "You might——" I shut the door.

I went into my room across the corridor and prepared to spend a quiet, useful, self-effacing afternoon with my work-basket and my employer's new "pretties."

Later.

What a different afternoon it has turned out to be!

I suppose it was about twenty minutes later, but scarcely had I embroidered the first white silken "M" on Million's new crêpe-de-chine "nightie" than there was a light tap at my door. I thought it was my own tea.

"Come in," I called.

Enter the sandy-haired, middle-aged chamber-maid. She stood, looking mightily perplexed.

Well, I suppose we are rather a perplexing proposition! Two girls of twenty-three, turning up at the Hotel Cecil with highly luxurious-looking but empty baggage, and clad as it were off a stall at some country rectory jumble sale! Blossoming forth the next day into attire of the most chic and costly! One girl, with a voice and accent of what Aunt Anastasia still calls "the governing class," acting as maid to the other, whose accent is—well, different. I wonder what the chamber-maid thinks?

She said: "Oh, if you please—"

(No "madam" this time, though she was obviously on the verge of putting it in!)

"—if you please, Miss Million sent me to tell you that she wished her maid to come to her at once."

Good gracious! This was an unexpected move.

An "S O S" signal, I supposed, from Million in distress! My employer, utterly unable to cope with the situation and the "strange young gentlemen alone," had ordered up reinforcements! An order! Yes, it was an order from mistress to maid!

My first impulse was frankly to refuse. I wonder how many maids have felt it in their time over an unbargained-for order?

"Tell her I'm not coming." This was what I nearly said to the chamber-maid.

Then I remembered that one couldn't possibly say things like that.

I sat for another second in disconcerted silence, my needle, threaded with white silk, poised above the nightie.

Then I said: "Tell Miss Million, please, that I will be with her in a moment."

At the time I didn't mean to go. I meant to sit on, quietly sewing, where I was until the visitors had gone. Then I could "have it out" with Million herself afterwards....

But before I put in three more stitches my heart misgave me again.

Poor little Million! In agonies of nervousness! What a shame to let her down! And supposing that she, in her desperation, came out to fetch me in!

I put aside my work and hastened across the corridor to my employer's sitting-room. As I opened the door I heard an unexpected sound. That sound seemed to take me right back to our tiny kitchen in Putney, when Aunt Anastasia was out, and Million and I were gossiping together.

Million's laugh!

Surely she couldn't be laughing now, in the middle of her nervousness!

I went in.

A charming picture met me; a picture that might have hung at the Academy under the title of "Two Strings to Her Bow" or "The Eternal Trio," or something else appropriate to the grouping of two young men and a pretty girl.

The girl (Million), black-haired, white-frocked, and smiling, was sitting on a pink-covered couch, close to one of the young men—the bigger, more gorgeously dressed one. This was, of course, Mr. James Burke. He looked quite as effective as he had done in his coaching get-up. For now he wore a faultless morning-coat and the most George-Alexandrian of perfectly creased trousers. His head was as smoothily and glossily black as his own patent-leather boots. "Seen close to," as Million puts it, he was showily good-looking, especially about the eyes, with which he was gazing into the little heiress's flushed face. They were of that death-dealing compound, deep blue, with thick, black lashes. What a pity that those eyes shouldn't have been bestowed by Providence upon some deserving woman, like myself, instead of being wasted upon a mere man. But possibly the Honourable James didn't consider them waste. He'd made good use of them and of his persuasive voice, and of his time generally, with Miss Million, the Sausage King's niece!

They were sitting there, leaving the other poor young man looking quite out of it, talking as if they were the greatest friends. As to Million's nervous terror, I can only say, in her own phrase, that "nervousness and she were strangers!" That Irishman had worked a miracle; he'd put Million at ease in his presence! I came right in and stood looking as indescribably meek as I knew how.

My employer looked up at me with an odd expression on her small face.

For the first time there was in it a dash of "I-don't-care-what-you-think-I-shall-do-what-I-like!" And for the first time she addressed me without any hesitation by the name that I, Beatrice Lovelace, have taken as my nom de guerre.

"Oh, Smith," said Million—Miss Million, "I sent for you because I want you to pour out the tea for us. Pourin' out is a thing I always did 'ate—hate."

"Yes, Miss," I said.

And I turned to obey orders at the tea-table.

As meekly as if I'd been put into the world for that purpose alone, I began to pour out tea for Miss Million and her guests.

The tea-table was set in the alcove of the big window, so that I had to turn my back upon the trio. But I could feel eyes upon my back. Well! I didn't mind. It was a gracefully fitted back at last, in that perfectly cut, thin black gown, with white muslin apron-strings tied in an impertinent little bow.

There was a silence in the room where the hostess had been laughing and the principal guest—I suppose she looked upon this Mr. Burke as the principal guest—had been purring away to her in that soft Irish voice of his.

I filled the cups and turned—to meet the honest sunburnt face of the other visitor, Mr. Reginald Brace. He'd got up and taken a quick step towards me. I never saw anything quite so blankly bewildered as his expression as he tried hard not to stare at that little white muslin butterfly cap in my hair.

Of course! This was his first intimation that I, who had been Million's mistress, was now Miss Million's maid!

In a dazed voice he spoke to me: "Can't I——Do let me help you——"

"Oh, thank you," I said quietly and businesslikely. "Will you take this to Miss Million, please?"

He handed the cups to the others, and I followed and handed the cream, milk, and sugar. It felt like acting in a scene out of some musical comedy, at the Gaiety, say. And I daresay it looked like it, what with the pretty, flower-filled sitting-room, and Million's French white muslin with the grey-blue sash, and my stage-soubrette livery, and the glossily groomed Mr. Burke as the young hero! I surprised a very summing-up glance from those black-lashed blue eyes of his as I waited on him. How is it that every syllable spoken in a certain kind of Irish voice seems to mean a compliment, even if it's only "thank you" for the sugar? I went back and stood as silent and self-effacing as a statue, or a really well-trained servant, by the tea-things, while the Honourable James Burke went on improving the shining hour with his millionaire hostess.

This was the sort of conversation that had been going on, evidently, from the start:

"Isn't it an extraordinary thing, now, that I should be sitting here, cosily talking to you like this, when just at this same time last year, my dear Miss Million, I was sitting and talking to that dear old uncle of yours in Chicago?" he said. "Every afternoon I used to go and sit by his bedside——"

"A year ago, was it?" put in Million. "Why, Mr. Burke, I never knew uncle had been poorly so long as that; I thought he was taken ill quite sudden."

"Oh, yes, of course. So he was," Mr. Burke put in quickly. "But you know he had an awful bad doing a good time before that. Sprained his ankle, poor old boy, and had to lie up for weeks. Awfully tedious for him; he used to get so ratty, if you don't mind my saying so, Miss Million. He used to flare up in his tempers like a match, dear old fellow!"

"Well, I never. I'm rather that way myself," from the delighted Million, who was obviously hanging on every word that fell from the young fortune-hunter's improvising lips. "Must be in the family!"

"Ah, yes; it always goes with that generous, frank, natural disposition. Always hasty as well! So much better than sulking, I always think," from the Irishman. "When it's over, it's over. Why, as your dear old uncle used to say to me, 'Jim,' he'd say—he always called me Jim——"

"Did he really, now?" from Million. "Fancy!"

Yes, it was all "fancy," I thought.

As I stood there listening to that glib West of Ireland accent piling detail on detail to the account of the Honourable Jim's friendship with the old Chicago millionaire a queer conviction strengthened in my mind. I didn't believe a word of it!

"One of the best old chaps I ever knew. Hard and crusty on the outside—a rough diamond, if you know what I mean—but one of Nature's own gentlemen. I'm proud to think he had a good opinion of me——"

All a make-up for the benefit of the ingenuous, ignorant little heiress to whom he was talking! He was brazenly "pulling" Miss Million's unsophisticated leg! Honourable or not, he was an unscrupulous adventurer, this Jim Burke! And the other young man—the young bank manager, who sat there balancing a cup of tea in one hand and one of the pale-green Gunter's cakes in the other? He hadn't a word to say. There he sat. I glanced at him. He looked wooden. But behind the woodenness there was disapproval, I could see. Disapproval of the whole situation. Ah! I shouldn't have to ask him what he thought of the Honourable Jim Burke. I could read Mr. Brace's opinion of him written in every line of Mr. Brace's clean-shaven, honest face that somehow didn't look so handsome this afternoon. Showiness such as that of the big, black-haired, blue-eyed Irishman is enough to "put out" the light of any one else! Why, why did I allow Million to meet him? He'd take care that this was not the only time! He was taking care of that.

I heard him saying something about taking Miss Million on the coach somewhere. I saw Miss Million clap her hands that are still rather red and rough from housework, manicure them as I will.

"What, me! On a coach? What, with all them lovely white horses and that trumpeter?" cried Million gleefully. "Would I like it? Oh, Mr. Burke!"

Mr. Burke immediately began arranging dates and times for this expedition. He said, I think, "the day after to-morrow——"

Oh, dear! What am I going to do about this? Forbid her to go? Up to now everything that I have said has had such an immense influence upon little Million. But now? What about that quite new gleam of defiance in her grey eyes? Alas! the influence of one girl upon the actions of another girl may be as "immense" as you please, but wait until it is countermined by some newly appeared, attractive young scoundrel of a man! (I am sure he is a scoundrel.)

I foresee heated arguments between my young mistress and myself, with many struggles ahead.

Meanwhile, I feel that my only hope lies in Mr. Brace. Without a word passing between us, I felt that he understood something of my anxiety in this situation. He might be able to help me, though I think I should have thought more of him if he had tried to talk a little this afternoon instead of allowing the conversation to consist of a monologue by that Irishman, punctuated by rapturous little Cockney comments from Miss Million.

He, Mr. Brace, left first.

I glided away from my station at the table to open the door for him.

"Thank you," he said. "Good afternoon, Miss Lovelace." I must see him again, or write to him, to ask for his help, I think!

The Honourable Jim tore himself from Million's side about five minutes later.

"Good-bye, Miss Million. I wish I could tell you how much it's meant to me, meeting my old friend's niece in this way," purred the golden voice, while the Honourable Jim held Million's little hand in his and gazed down upon the enraptured face of her. One sees faces like that sometimes outlining the gallery railing at a theatre, while below the orchestra drawls out a phrase of some dreamy waltz and, on the stage, the matinée hero turns his best profile to the audience and murmurs thrillingly: "Little girl! Do you dream how different my life could be—with you?"

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the Honourable Jim had made up his mind to say something of the sort to Million, quite soon!

Of course, his life would be "different" if he had heaps of money. Somehow I can't help feeling that, in spite of his clothes and the dash he cuts, he hasn't a penny to his name.

"Good-bye. A bientôt," he said to Million.

Oh, why did I ever bring her to the Cecil? As the door closed behind her visitor Million breathed a heavy sigh and said, just as those theatre-going girls say at the drop of a curtain: "Wasn't he lovely?"

Then she threw herself down on to the couch, which bounced. Something fell from it on to the floor.

"There, if he hasn't left his walkin'-stick be'ind him!" exclaimed Million, picking up a heavy ebony cane with a handsome gold top to it. I realised that here was an excuse, hatched up by that conscienceless young Celt, to return shortly.

Million didn't see that. She exclaimed: "Now I've got to run after him with it, I s'pose——"

"No, you haven't, Miss Million. I will take it. It's the maid's place," I interposed. And quickly I took the cane and slipped out into the corridor with it.

I caught up with the tall visitor just as he reached the lift.

"You left your cane in Miss Million's room, sir," I said to him in a tone as stiff as that of a lady's-maid turned into a pillar of ice.

The big Irishman turned. But he did not put out his hand for the cane at once.

He just said, "That's very kind of you," and smiled at me. Smiled with all those bold blue eyes of his. Then he said in a voice lower and more flattering even than he had used to the heiress herself: "I wanted a word with you, Miss Lovelace, I think they call you. It's just this——"

He paused, smiled more broadly all over his handsome face, and added these surprising words:

"What's your game, you two?"

"Game!—I beg your pardon!" I said haughtily. (I hope I didn't show how startled and confused I was. What could he mean by "our game"?)

I gazed up at him, and he gave a short laugh. Then he said: "Is it because nothing suits a pretty woman better than that kit? Is it just because you know the man's not born that can resist ye in a cap and apron?"

I was too utterly taken aback to think of any answer. I thrust the cane into his hands, and fled back, down the corridor, into my mistress's room. And, as I went in, I think I heard the Honourable Jim still laughing.

CHAPTER XIII

MY FIRST "AFTERNOON OUT"

"Don't you think it's about time you went and had an afternoon out, Smith?"

This was the remark addressed to me by my employer the morning after the afternoon of her first tea-party.

For a moment I didn't answer. The fact is I was too angry! This is absurd, of course. For days I've scolded Million for forgetting our quick change of positions, and for calling me "Miss" or "Miss Beatrice." And yet, now that the new heiress is beginning to realise our respective rôles and to call me, quite naturally, by the name which I chose for myself, I'm foolishly annoyed. I feel the stirring of a rebellious little thought. "What cheek!"

This must be suppressed.

"You know you did ought to have one afternoon a week," our once maid-of-all-work reminded me as she sat in a pale-blue glorified dressing-gown in front of the dressing-table mirror. I had drawn up a lower chair beside her, and was doing my best with the nails of one of her still coarse and roughened little hands, gently pushing the ill-treated skin away from the "half-moons." Million's other hand was dipped into a clouded marble bowl full of warm, lemon-scented emollient stuff.

"Here you've been doin' for me for well over the week now, and haven't taken a minute off for yourself."

"Oh, I haven't wanted one, thanks," I replied rather absently.

I wasn't thinking of what Million was saying. I was pondering rather helplessly over the whole situation; thinking of Million, of her childish ignorance and her money, of myself, of that flattering-tongued, fortune-hunting Irishman who had asked me in the corridor what "our game" was, of that coach-drive that he intended to take Million to-morrow, of what all this was going to lead to.

"Friday, this afternoon. I always had Fridays off. You'd better take it," the new heiress said, with quite a new note of authority. "You can pop out dreckly after lunch, and I shan't want you back again until it's time for you to come and do me up for late dinner."

Miss Million dines in her room; but she is, as she puts it, "breakin' in all her low-cut gowns while she's alone, so as to get accustomed to the feel of it."

I looked at her.

I thought, "Why does she want me out of the way?"

For I couldn't help guessing that this was at the bottom of Miss Million's offering her maid that afternoon out!

I said: "Oh, I don't think there's anywhere I want to go to, just yet."

"Better go, and have it settled, like. Makes it more convenient to you, and more convenient to me, later on, if we know exactly how we stand about your times off," said Million quite obstinately. "I shan't want you after two this afternoon."

This she evidently meant quite literally.

I shall have to go, and to leave her to her own devices. I wonder what they will be? Perhaps an orgy of more shopping, without me, buying all the cerise atrocities that I wouldn't allow her to look at. Garments and trimmings of cerise would be a pitfall to Miss Million but for her maid. So would what she calls "a very sweet shade of healiotrope." Perhaps it's worse than that, though. Perhaps she's having Mr. Burke to tea again, and wishes to keep it from the maid who said such disapproving things about him. I shall have to leave that, for the present.... I shall just have to take this afternoon out.

I went out, wondering where I should go. My feet seemed of their own accord to take me westwards, through Trafalgar Square and Pall Mall. I walked along, seeing little of the sauntering summer crowds. My mind was full of my own thoughts, my own frettings. I'd cut myself off from my own people, and what was going to come of it? Not the glorious independence I'd hoped for. No; a whole heap of new difficulties, and anything but a free hand wherewith to cope with them!

I came out of this rather gloomy reflection to find myself in Bond Street. That narrow, Aristocrat-of-all-the-Thoroughfares has seen a good deal of Miss Million and her maid during the last couple of days. Not much of a change for my afternoon off! I didn't want to do any more shopping; in fact, I shan't be able to do any more shopping for myself for the next six months, seeing that of the two quarters' salary that I asked Miss Million to advance me there remains about five shillings and sixpence.

But I might give myself a little treat; say, tea in a nice place with a good band and a picture-gallery first. That might help me to forget, for an hour or so, the troubles and trials of being the lady's-maid to a millionairess.

This was why I paid away one of my few remaining shillings at the turnstile of the Fine Art Society, and sauntered into the small, cool gallery.

There was rather an amusing picture-show on. Drawings of things that I myself had been up to my eyes in for the last day or so; the latest fashions for nineteen-fourteen! Drawings by French artists that made clothes, fashion-plates, look as fascinating and as bizarre as the most wonderful orchids. Such curious titles, too, were given to these clever little pictures of feminine attire: "It is dark in the park"; "A rose amid the roses."

There was one picture of a simple frock made not unlike Miss Million's white muslin with the blue sash, but how different frocks painted are from frocks worn! Or was it that the French manikin in the design knew how to wear the——

My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a voice speaking above my shoulder, speaking to me:

"Ah! And is this where Miss Million's maid gathers her inspirations for dressing Miss Million?"

I knew who this was, even before I turned from the pictures to face what looked like another very modern fashion-plate. A fashion-design for the attire of a young man about town, the Honourable Jim Burke! So he wasn't calling on Miss Million again this afternoon, after all! That ought to be one weight off my mind; and yet it wasn't. I felt curiously nervous of this man. I don't know why. He raised his glossy hat and smiled down at me. He spoke in the courteous tone of one enchanted to meet some old acquaintance. "Good afternoon, Miss Lovelace!"

A maid may not cut her mistress's chosen friends, even on her afternoon out. I was obliged to say "Good afternoon," which I did in a small and icy voice. Then, in spite of myself, I heard myself saying: "My name is Smith."

The Honourable Jim said coolly: "Oh, I think not?"

I said, standing there, all in black, against the gay background of coloured French drawings: "Smith is the name that I am known by as Miss Million's maid."

"Exactly," said the big young Irishman gently, looking down at me and leaning on his ebony, gold-headed stick.

He added, almost in a friendly manner: "You know, that's just what I've been wanting to have a little talk to you about."

"A talk to me?" I said.

"Yes, to you, Miss Smith-Lovelace," he nodded. "You do belong to the old Lovelace Court Lovelaces, I suppose. The Lady Anastasia lot, that had to let the place. Great pity! Yes! I know all about you," said this alarming young man with those blue eyes that seemed to look through my face into the wall and out again into Bond Street. "Let's see, in your branch there'll be only you and the one brother left, I believe? Lovelace, Reginald M., Lieutenant Alexandra's Own, I.A. What does he think of this?"

"Of which?" I fenced, not knowing what else to say to this surprising and disconcerting person. "You seem to know a good deal about people's families, Mr. Burke." This I thought was a good way of carrying the war into the enemy's own country, "or to say you do."

I added this with great emphasis. I meant him to realise that I saw through him. That I'd guessed it was all pure romancing what he had been murmuring yesterday to my unsuspecting little mistress about his friendship with her uncle.

That would astonish this young fortune-hunter, thought I. That would leave him without a word to say for himself. And then he'd leave me. He'd turn and go, foiled. And even if he persisted in his attentions to the dazzled Miss Million, he would remain in a very wholesome state of terror of Miss Million's maid. This was what I foresaw happening in a flash. Picture my astonishment, therefore, at what did happen.

The young man took me up without a quiver.

"Ah, you mean that affecting little yarn about old man Million, in Chicago, don't you?" he said pleasantly. "Very touching, you'll agree, the way I'd cling to his bedside and put up with his flares of temper, the dear old (Nature's) gentleman——"

I would have given yet another quarter's salary not to have done what I did at this moment. I laughed.

That laugh escaped me—I don't know how. How awful! There I stood in the gallery, with only a sort of custodian and a couple of art-students about, laughing up at this well-dressed, showy, unprincipled Irishman as if we were quite friends! I who disapproved of him so utterly! I who mean to do all in my power to keep him and Million's money apart!

He said: "Didn't I know you had a sense of humour? Let us continue this very interesting conversation among the Polar landscapes downstairs. That's what I came in here to see. We'll sit and admire the groups of penguins among the icebergs while we talk."

"No; I don't think we will," said I. I didn't mean to do anything this young man meant me to. I wasn't Million, to be hypnotised by his looks and his clothes and his honeyed Irish voice, forsooth. "I don't care to see those photographs. Not a bit like the Pole, probably. I am not coming down, Mr. Burke."

"Ah, come along," he persisted, smiling at me as he stood at the top of the stairs that led to the other exhibition. "Be a good little girl and come, now!"

"Certainly not," I said, with considerable emphasis on the "not."

I repeated steadily: "I am not coming. I have nothing to talk to you about. And, really, I think I have seen quite enough——"

"Of you!" was my unspoken ending to this sentence. These "asides" seem to sprinkle one's conversations with words written, as it were, in invisible ink. How seldom can one publish them abroad, these mental conclusions of one's remarks! No, no; life is quite complicated enough without that.... So I concluded, rather lamely, looking round the gallery with the drawings of Orientalised Europeans: "I have seen quite enough of this exhibition. So I am going——"

"To have tea, of course. That is a very sound scheme of yours, Miss Lovelace," said Mr. Burke briskly but courteously. "You'll let me have the pleasure of taking you somewhere, won't you?"

"Certainly not," I said again. This time the emphasis was on the "certainly." Then, as I was turning to leave the gallery, I looked again at this Mr. Burke. He may be what my far-away brother Reggie would call "a wrong 'un." And I believe that he is. But he is certainly a very presentable-looking wrong 'un—far more presentable than I, Beatrice Lovelace, am—was, I mean. Thank goodness, and my mistress's salary, there is absolutely no fault to be found with my entirely plain black outdoor things. And, proportionately, I have spent more of the money on my boots, gloves, and neckwear than on the other part of my turn-out. There's some tradition in our family of Lady Anastasia's having laid down this law. It is quite "sound," as Mr. Burke called it.

Now this presentable-looking but otherwise very discreditable Mr. Burke was quite capable of following me wherever I went. And if there is one thing I should loathe it is any kind of "fuss" in a public place. So, I thought swiftly, perhaps the best way of avoiding this fuss is to go quietly—but forbiddingly—to have tea. I needn't let him pay for it. So I said coldly to the big young man at my heels in the entrance: "I am going to Blank's."

"Oh, no," said Mr. Burke pleasantly, "we are going to White's. Don't you like White's?"

I had never been there in my life, of course, but I did not tell him so.

CHAPTER XIV

CREAM AND COMPLIMENTS

In a few minutes we were sitting opposite to each other at a pretty table in the upper room. We were close to the window and could look down on the Bond Street crowd of people and cars. In front of us was the daintiest little tea that I had ever seen. This young man is, of course, accustomed to ordering the sort of tea that women like?

"And this is the second time that you have poured out tea for me, Miss Lovelace!" remarked the Honourable Jim Burke, as he took the cup from my hand. "Admirable little hostess that you are, remembering not to ask me whether I take sugar; storing up in your mind that what I like is a cupful of sugar with a little tea to moisten it!"

This was quite true.

I felt myself blush as I sat there. Then I glared at him over the plate of delicious cakes. The young man smiled; a nice smile, that one must allow.

"You look like a little angry black pigeon now. You've just the movements of a pigeon ready to peck at some one, and the plumage," he said, with a critical blue eye on my close-fitting black jacket. "All it lacks is just a touch of bright coral-red somewhere. A chain, now; a charm on the bangle; a flower. It's to you I ought to have sent those carnations, instead of to your——Do you call her your mistress, that other girl? That one with the voice? Mad idea, the whole arrangement, isn't it? Just think it over for a moment, and tell me yourself. Don't you think it's preposterous?"

"I—er——"

I didn't know what to say. I bit into one of the little cakes that seemed all chocolate and solidity outside. Inside it was all cream and soft-heartedness and sherry flavouring, and it melted over on to the crisp cloth.

"There, now, look what a mess you're making," commented the young Irishman with the undeservedly pleasant voice. "Try one of these almondy fellows that you can see what you're doing with. To return to you and your masquerade as Miss Million's maid——"

"It is not a masquerade," I explained with dignity. "I don't know what you mean by your—I am in Miss Million's service. I am her maid!"

"Have some strawberries and cream. Really fine strawberries, these," interpolated the Honourable Jim. "What was I saying—you her maid? Wouldn't it be just as sensible if I myself were to go and get myself taken on as valet by that other young fellow that was sitting there at tea in her rooms yesterday—the bank manager, or whatever he was? Curious idea to have a deaf-and-dumb chap as a manager."

Here I really had to bite my lips not to laugh again. Certainly poor Mr. Brace had descended, like Mr. Toots, into a well of silence for the whole of that afternoon. I daresay he thought the more.

"When I heard at the Cecil that all those boxes and things belonged to the very young lady with her maid, naturally enough I thought I knew which of the two was the mistress," pursued the Honourable Jim in a sort of spoken reverie, eating strawberries and cream with the gusto of a schoolgirl. "Then when I came up and saw the wrong one waiting on the other, and looking like a picture in her apron——"

"Please don't say those things to me," I interrupted haughtily.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't like it."

"It's a queer disposition the Lovelace women must be of, then. Different from the others. To take offence? To shy at the sound of a man's voice saying how sweet they look in something they've got new to wear? I will remember that," said Mr. Burke, still in that tone of reverie. With every word he spoke I longed more ardently to feel very angry with this young man. Yet every word seemed to make genuine anger more impossible. Sitting there over his strawberries and cream, he looked like some huge, irresponsible, and quite likeable boy. I had to listen to him. He went on: "Then when I saw you as the maid, I thought you'd just changed places for a joke. I made sure 'twas you that were Miss Million."

"What?" I cried.

For now I really was angry.

It was the same kind of hot, unreasonable, snobbish anger that surged all over me when Million (my mistress) began to lose her habit of saying "Miss," and of speaking to me as if I'd come from some better world. Utterly foolish and useless anger, in the circumstances. Still, there it was. I flushed with indignation. I looked straight at the Honourable Jim Burke as I said furiously: "Then you really took me—me!—for the niece of that dreadful old—of that old man in Chicago?"

"I did. But, remember," said Mr. Burke, "I'd never set eyes on that old man."

"Ah! You admit that, then," I said triumphantly and accusingly, "in spite of all that long story to Miss Million. You admit yourself that it was all a make-up! What do you suppose Miss Million will say to that?"

The young fortune-hunter looked at me with perfect calm and said: "Who's to tell her that I admitted I'd never seen her old uncle?"

"To tell her? Why!" I took up. "Her maid! Supposing I go and tell her——"

"Ah, but don't you see? I'm not supposing any such thing," said Mr. Burke. "You'll never tell, Miss Lovelace."

"How d'you know?"

"I know," he said. "Don't I know that you'd never sneak?"

And, of course, this was so true. Equally, of course, I was pleased and annoyed with him at the same time for knowing it. I frowned and stared away down Bond Street. Then I turned to him again and said: "You said to me yesterday, 'What is your game?'"

"So I did. But now that I've found out you're not the heiress herself, I know what your game is."

"What?"

"The same as mine," declared this amazing young fortune-hunter, very simply. "Neither of us has a penny. So we both 'go where money is.' Isn't that it, now?"

"No, no!" I said hotly. "You are hatching up an introduction to Miss Million, deceiving her, laughing at her, plotting against her, I expect. I'm just an ordinary lady's-maid to her, earning my wages."

"By the powers, they'll take some earning before you're done," prophesied the young Irishman, laughing, "mark my words. You'll have your work cut out for you, minding that child let loose with its hands full of fireworks. I feel for you, you poor little girl. I do, indeed."

"Really. You—you don't behave as if you did. People like you won't make my 'work' any easier," I told him severely. "You know you are simply turning Miss Million's head, Mr. Burke."

"Oh, you wrong me there," he said solemnly.

"I don't wrong you at all. I see through you perfectly," I said. And I did. His mouth might be perfectly grave, but blue imps were dancing in his eyes. "You are flattering and dazzling poor Mi—my mistress, just because she has never met any one like you before!"

"Ah! You've met so many of us unprincipled men of the world!" sighed Mr. Burke. "I daren't hope to impose on your experience, Miss Lovelace. (We'll have two lemon water ices, please"—to the waitress.)

"No, but you are imposing on her," I scolded him, "with your—your stories of knowing her uncle, and all that. And now you're——"

"Well, what are my other crimes?"

I took breath and said: "You're asking her out for drives in that coach of yours——"

"Would to Heaven it were my coach," sighed Lord Ballyneck's youngest son. "It belongs to my good pal Leo Rosencranz, that turn-out! I am merely——"

"What I want to know is," I broke in very severely, "where is all this going to lead to?"

He took the wafer off his ice before replying. Then he said very mildly: "Brighton, I thought."

Isn't an Irishman the most hopeless sort of person to whom to try to talk sense? Particularly angry sense!

"I don't mean the coach-drive," I said crossly. "You knew that, Mr. Burke. I mean your acquaintance with my employer. Where is that going to lead to?"

"I hope it's going to lead to mutual benefits," announced the Honourable Jim briskly. "Now, since you're asking me my intentions like this, I'll tell them to you. I've never before had the knife laid to my throat like this, and by a bit of a chestnut-haired girl, too! Well, I intend to see a good deal of Miss Million. I shall introduce to her a lot of people who'll be useful, one way and another. Haven't I sent two friends of mine to call on her this afternoon?"

"Have you?" I said.

So that was the reason Million insisted on my taking the afternoon off! She didn't intend me to see his friends! I wondered who they were.

Mr. Burke went on: "Between ourselves, I intend to be a sort of Cook's guide through life to your young friend—your employer, Miss Million. A young woman in her position simply can't do without some philanthropist to show her the ropes. Perhaps she began by thinking you might be able to do that, Miss—Smith?" he laughed softly. He said: "But I shall soon have her turning to me for guidance as naturally as a needle turns to the north. I tell you I'm the very man to help a forlorn orphan who doesn't know what to do with a fortune. Money, by Ishtar! How well I know where to take it! Pity I never have a stiver of my own to do it with!"

"You haven't?" I said.

"Child, I'm a pauper," he replied. "The descendant of Irish kings; need I say more? There's not a page-boy at the Cecil who hasn't more ordinary comforts in his home than I have. My father's the poorest peer in Ireland. My brother's the poorest eldest son; and I—I tell you I can't afford to spend a week at Ballyneck; the damp in the rooms would ruin my clothes; the sound of the rats rompin' up and down the tapestry would destroy my high spirits; and then where'd I be?"

I looked at him. He, too, then, was of the nouveaux-pauvres, the class that is sinking down, down under the scrambling, upward-climbing feet of the successful. But he took the situation in a different spirit from the way in which my Aunt Anastasia took it. He frankly made what he could out of it. He hoisted the Jolly Roger and became a pirate on the very seas that had engulfed the old order.

Disgraceful of him.... One ought not to wish to listen to what he had to say.

"Champagne tastes on a beer income; that's bad. But here's this little—this little Million girl with a champagne income and no tastes at all yet. I shall be worth half her income to her in consequence," he announced. "I shall be able to give her priceless tips. Advice, you know, about—oh, where to buy all the things she'll want. The cars. The wines and cigars. (Even a grown-up woman isn't often to be trusted about those.) The country house she'll have to take. What about Lovelace Court, Miss Lovelace? Care to have her there, in case the people who have got it want to turn out? I've no doubt I could wangle that for you, if you liked."

I said, feeling bewildered, and flurried, and amused all at once: "What is 'wangle'?"

The Honourable Jim Burke laughed aloud as he devoured his lemon water ice.

"You'll know the meaning of that mystic verb before you have known me very long," he said. "It's the way I make my living."

I looked at him, sitting there so debonair and showy in his expensive raiment, talking so cynically in that golden voice. So typically one of "our" world, as Aunt Anastasia prophetically calls it; yet so ready to rub shoulders with every other kind of world that there may be—Jews, theatrical people, hotel porters, pork-butchers, heiresses!

I asked, rather inquisitively: "Make your living how? What do you do?"

"People, mostly," said the Honourable Jim with a cheery grin.

No; there's no getting any truth or any sense out of a man like that.

Just before we rose from the tea-table I said to him: "And the end of it all? I suppose you'll marry—I suppose you'll get Miss Million to marry you!"

"Marry?" said Mr. Burke with a little quick movement of his broad chest and shoulders. An odd movement! It seemed mixed up of a start, a shudder, and a shaking aside of something. "Marry? A woman with a voice like that? And hands like that?"

This touched my professional pride as manicurist and lady's-maid. I told him: "Her hands are much better since I've been looking after them!"

"They must have been pretty rough-hewn," said Mr. Burke, candidly, "before!"

"Of course, they were in a horrid state," I said unguardedly. "But yours would be red and rough if you'd had to scrub and to wash up and to black-lead fireplaces——"

"What? Had the little Million been doing all that before she came into Uncle's money?" cried the Honourable Jim, with delighted interest beaming all over his face. "Truth is stranger than cinema films! Tell me on, now; where was this Dollar Princess in service?"

"With m——" I began. Then I shut my lips with a snap. What was happening? This young man that I had meant to cross-examine was simply "pumping" me! Not only that, but I was very nearly getting to the point of being ready to tell him anything he asked. How had this come about? Anyhow, it must not be. I put on a very forbidding look and said: "I shall not tell you where Miss Million was."

"Haven't ye told me? She was with you or your relatives. If that isn't the grandest joke!" chuckled this unsuppressable young man. "Don't attempt to deny it, for I see it all now. Isn't it the finest bit of light opera? Isn't it better than me wildest dreams? And how did she shape, the heiress? What sort of a character would you give her? Was she an early riser—honest, obliging? Could she wait at table? And is it a bit of her own she's getting back now, setting you to hand round the cups?" He laughed aloud. "Can't I see it all now—the pride of her? She that was waiting on you, she's got you to skivvy for her now! Oh, I wouldn't have missed this Drama of the Domestic Servant Problem! Don't hope to keep me out of the stalls, Miss Lovelace, after this! It's in the front row I shall be in future for every performance!"

With this alarming threat he finished his ice and laughed once more, joyously. While I was debating what to say, he took up the conversation again.

"Tell me, are you going to get Miss Million's hands to look exactly like yours?" he asked, fastening his eyes on my fingers. I clenched my fists and hid them away under the table. "Ah, but I noticed them at once. And your voice? Are you going to teach her to speak exactly as you do? Because, when that happens——" He paused (at last).

"Well?" I said, beginning to put on my new gloves. "When that happens, what?"

"Why, then I shall certainly beg her to marry me," declared the Irishman. "Faith, I'll go down on my knees to the girl then."

"Not until then?" I suggested. I was really anxious to get through this baffling young man's nonsense. I wanted to find out what he really meant to do about all this.

But he only shook his head with that mock-solemn air. He only said: "Child, who knows what's going to happen to any of us, and when?"

Half the way back to the Cecil (Mr. Burke had hailed a taxi for me and had then got into it with me) I was wondering what I am to say to my mistress, Miss Million, about the happenings of my afternoon out. How am I to break it to her that I spent nearly the whole of it in the society of a young man against whom I have been warning her—Million—ever since he first sent in his card?

"Does your Miss Million allow flowers?" Mr. Burke said cheerfully as we whizzed down the Haymarket. "To you, I mean?"

It was an outrageous thing to say. But in that voice it somehow didn't sound outrageous, or even disrespectful. The voice of the Celt, whether Irish, Highland-Scottish, or Welsh, does always seem to have the soft pedal down on it. And it's a most unfair advantage, that voice, for any man to possess.

I said hastily: "Really, I don't think you need speak to me as if I were a maid on her afternoon——"

Here I remembered that this was exactly what I was. And again I was forced into reluctant laughter.

"You've no business to be taking the job on at all," said the young man at my side in the taxi, quite gravely this time. "Was there nothing else you could do, Miss Lovelace?"

"No; nothing."

"What about woman's true sphere? You ought to get married."

"Very easy to say that, for a man," I said. "How could I get married?"

Really earnestly he replied: "Have you tried?"

"No! Of course not!"

"You should," he said. He looked down at me in a curious, kindly way. He said: "I've wangled things harder than that both for myself and my friends. Men like a wife that can wear diamonds as if they belonged to her; a wife that can talk the same language as some of their best clients. Well! Here's a charming young girl, with looks, breeding, and a fine old name. Can do!" he brought his flat hand down on the top of his ebony cane, and added, "Have you a hatred of foreigners?"

"Foreigners?" I repeated, rather breathless again over the sudden conversational antics of a young man who can't be serious for two seconds together. "Foreigners? What for?"

"Why, for a husband! Supposing now that I were to introduce to you a fellow I knew, a fellow with 'a heart of gold' and pretty well everything else in metal to match it, like all these German Jews——"

I gasped: "You think I ought to marry a German Jew?"

"That's just the merest idea of mine. Startled you, did it? We'll discuss it later, you and I. But it'll take time. Lots of time—and, by Jove! There isn't any too much of that now," he exclaimed, glancing at his wrist-watch as we passed the lions of Trafalgar Square, "if I'm to get back to your—to our Miss Million——"

"Is she expecting you," I asked rather sharply, "again?"

"She is not. But here are these two friends of mine calling on her; and I'm bound to put in an appearance before they leave. Rather so! I'm not turning them loose on any new heiresses, without keeping my eye on what they're up to," explained the Honourable James Burke with his usual bland frankness. "So here I stop the taxi."

He got out. I saw him feel in all his pockets, and at last he took out half a sovereign. (The last, I daresay.)

Then he turned to me. "I'll give you three minutes' start, child, to get back to the hotel and into that cap and apron of yours. One more word.... Go through the lounge, and you'll see the animals feeding. Go on, man"—to the taxi driver: "The Hotel Cecil; fly!"

CHAPTER XV

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PARTY

Miss Million and her callers were having tea in the bigger "lounge," or whatever they call the gilded hall behind the great glass doors which shut it off from the main entrance.

Now, this was the first time that my mistress had plucked up courage to take a meal downstairs since we had come to the Cecil.

I wondered how she'd been getting on. I must see!

So, still in my outdoor things, I passed the glass doors. I walked into the big tea-room. There were palms, and much gilding, and sofas, and dark-eyed, weary-looking waiters wheeling round little carts spread with dainties, and offering the array of éclairs and flat apple-cakes to the different groups—largely made up of American visitors—who were sitting at the plate-glass-topped tables.

I couldn't see Million—Miss Million's party—anywhere at first!

I looked about....

At the further end of the place a string band, half-hidden behind greenery, was playing "I Shall Dream of You the Whole Night." Peals of light laughter and ripples of talk came from a gay-looking group of frocks—with just one man's coat amongst them—gathered around a table near the band.

I noticed that the eyes of everybody within earshot were turning constantly towards this table. So I looked, too.

At whom were they all staring? At a plump, bright-haired woman in all-white, who was obviously entertaining the party—to say nothing of the rest of the room.

She had a figure that demanded a good deal of French lingerie blouse, but not much skirt. The upright feather in her hat was yellow; jewelled slides glittered in her brass-bright hair; her eyes were round and very black.

She reminded me of a sulphur-crested, white cockatoo I had seen at the Zoo.

But where had I seen her before? She puzzled and fascinated me. I stood a little way off, forgetting my errand, watching this vivacious lady, the centre of the group. She was waving her cigarette to punctuate her remarks——

"Oh, young Jim's one of the best—the very best, my dears. Tiptop family and all. Who says blood doesn't tell, Leo? Ah! he's a good old pal o' mine, is the Hon. Jim Burke, specially on Fridays (treasury day, my dear); but it's the Army I'm potty about myself. The Captain (and dash the whiskers), that's the tiger that puts Leo and his lot in the shade——"

Here followed a wave of the cigarette towards the only man of the party. He was stout and astrachan-haired; a Jew even from the back view.

"Give me the military man, what, what," prattled on the cockatoo lady, whose cigarette seemed to spin a web about her of blue floating smoke wisps. "That's the boy that makes a hole in Vi's virgin heart!"

A fan-like gesture of her left hand, jewelled to the knuckles, upon the spread of the lady's embroidered blouse emphasised this declaration.

"Them's the fellers! Sons of the Empire—or of the Alhambra!" wound up the cockatoo lady with a rollicking laugh.

And as she laughed I caught her full face and the flash of a line of prominent, fascinatingly white teeth that lighted up her whole expression as a white wave lights up the whole shore.

Then I knew where I'd seen her before—in a hundred theatrical posters between the Hotel Cecil and the Bond Street tea-shop that I had just left. Yes, I'd seen this lady's highly coloured portrait above the announcement:

MISS VI VASSITY,
London's Love.
England's Premier Comedienne!

So that was who she was!

Beside her on the couch a couple of younger girls, also rather "stagily" dressed, were hanging on every word that fell from the music-hall favourite's vermilioned lips.

With her back to me, and with her chair drawn a little aside from the others, there sat yet another woman. She was enormously tall and slim, and eccentrically clad in Oriental draperies of some sombre, richly patterned stuff. This gave her the air of some graceful snake.

She turned and twisted the whole of her long, lissom person, now putting up a hand to smooth her slim throat, now stretching out a slender ankle; but all the time posing, and admiring the poses in the nearest mirror. She was scarcely listening to Miss Vi Vassity's chatter.

"Tea? Any more, anybody?" Miss Vassity's black eyes glanced about her. "Baby? Sybil? Lady G.?" (the latter to the cobra-woman).

"You, my dear?" turning to some one who was hidden behind her. "Half a cup—oh, come on now. It'll have to be a whole cup; we don't break our china here, as my dear old mother used to say at Baa-lamb.

"You know I sprang from the suburbs, girls, don't you? Better to spring than to sink, eh, Miss Millions—and trillions? Here you are; I'll pour it out."

The music-hall idol leant forward to the tea-tray. Beyond her sumptuous shoulder I caught a glimpse at last of the woman who'd been hidden.

I gasped with surprise. She was my Miss Million!

Yes! So these were the friends whom Mr. Burke had sent to call on her! And there she sat—or shrank—she who was supposed to be the hostess of the party!

Beneath her expensive new hat—quite the wrong one to wear with that particular frock, which she changed when I went out—her face was wide-eyed and dazed. She who had shown so much self-confidence at her last tea-party with just those two young men had lost it all in the midst of these other people.

There she sat, silent, lips apart, bewildered eyes moving from one to the other. Between the languid, posing cobra-woman and the gay, chattering, sulphur-crested cockatoo, she looked like a small hypnotised rabbit.

I slipped up to her with my best professional manner on.

"Did you want me for anything, Miss?" I asked in my lowest and most respectful tone.

Poor little Million's face lighted up into a look of the most pathetic relief as she turned and beheld her one friend in that tea-room.

"Ow! S-Smith! Come in, have you?" she exclaimed, giggling nervously. Then, turning to the music-hall artiste, she explained: "This is my lady's-maid!"

"And very nice, too!" said Miss Vi Vassity promptly, with one of those black-eyed glances that seemed to swing round from me to Million, thence to the cobra-woman, the other girls, the stout young Jew, all of whom were staring hard at me.

She ended up in a lightning-quick wink and a quick turn to the long glass that stood beside her teacup which, I suppose, had contained what those people the other day called a rattlesnake cocktail.

"I didn't send for you, Smith, but never mind since you're here," my young mistress said, almost clinging to me in her nervousness. "You can pop upstairs and begin to put out my evening things, as usual——"

"Extra smart to-night, Smith, extra smart; she's comin' on to a box at the Palace to see little Me in my great Dazzling act," put in the actress. "Got to be very dressy for that, old dear. Gala night at the Opera isn't in it.

"The black pearl rope you'll wear, of course. And your diamond fender to wave your hand to me in, please!"

"Ow!" breathed the dismayed heiress. "Well, I—I don't know as how I'd expected——"

She hasn't acquired any ornaments at all as yet. And, somehow, I knew that this black-eyed, bright-haired actress knew that perfectly well. For some reason she was pulling poor Million's leg just as mercilessly as her precious friend the Honourable Jim——

Even as I was thinking this there strolled up the room to our group the cool, detached, and prosperous-looking figure of the Honourable Jim himself—the man who had just got out of my taxi at Charing Cross.

Miss Vi jingled her gold mesh vanity-bag at him with its hanging cluster of gold charms, gold pencil, gold cigarette-case.

"Hi, Sunny Jim! You that know everything about 'what's worn, and where,'" she cried. "I'm just telling your friend Miss Million that nobody'd call on her again unless she puts on all the family diamonds for our little supper after the show to-night!"

Miss Million looked anguished. She really believed that she was going to be "let down" before her much-admired Mr. Burke (scamp!) before the cobra-lady and the other theatrical lights.

I knew how she felt!

She would be covered with disgrace, she would be "laughed at behind her back" because she was a millionairess—without any diamonds.... They'd think she wasn't a real millionairess....

I had to come to the rescue.

So I looked Million steadily and reassuringly in the eye as I announced quite distinctly, but in my "quiet, respectful" voice: "I am afraid, Miss, that there is scarcely time to get the diamonds for to-night. You remember that all the jewellery is at the bank."

Indescribable relief spread itself over Million's small face. She felt saved. She didn't mind anything now, not even the loudness with which the bright-haired comedienne burst out laughing again.

I wonder why that shrewd, vivacious woman comes to call on Million? It's not the money this time, surely?

Miss Vi Vassity must draw the largest salary of any one on the halls? Why does she sit beaming at my young mistress, drawing her out, watching her? And the other, the cobra-woman; what's she doing there in a world to which she doesn't seem to belong at all?

And the Jew they call Leo? Will they all be at the party they're taking Miss Million to to-night?

They all burst into fresh chatter about it. Under cover of the noise the Honourable Jim edged closer to me and murmured, without looking at me: "All her jewels at the bank, is it? That's not true, child, while she has a Kohinoor—for a maid!"

Fearful impertinence again. But, thank goodness, none of the others heard it.

And he, who's been drinking tea and chattering with me the whole afternoon, had the grace not to glance at me as I slipped away out of the tea-room and to the hall.

Here another surprise awaited me.

Miss Million began to enjoy her tea-party tremendously—as soon as it was all over and she herself was safely back in her own bedroom with her maid.

She didn't seem to realise that she had only then emerged from a state of shrinking and speechless panic!

"Jer see all those people, Smith, that I was having such a fine old time with?" she exulted, as I began to unfasten her afternoon frock.

"Miss Vi Vassity, if you please! Jer recanise her from the pictures? Lor'! When I did use to get to a music-hall to hear her, once in a blue moon, little did I ever think I'd one day be sitting there as close to her as I am to you, talkin' away nineteen to the dozen to her, as if she was nobody!

"Wasn't that a sweet blouse she'd got on? I wonder what she's goin' to put on to-night after the theatre; you know we're having supper all together, her and me and the Honourable Mr. Burke and Lady Golightly-Long, that tall lady, and some other gentlemen and ladies that's coming on from somewhere.

"And, Smith! I don't think I'm going to wear that white frock you're putting out there," concluded my young mistress, rather breathlessly; "there don't seem to me to be enough style about it for the occasion; I'll wear me cerise evening one with the spangles."

"Cerise? But you haven't got a cerise evening frock," I began. "I didn't let you order that——"

Then I caught Million's half-rueful, half-triumphant glance at a new white carton box on the wicker chair beside her bed. And I saw what had happened.

No sooner was her maid's back turned than Miss Million had wired, or telephoned, or perhaps called at that shop, and secured that cherry-coloured creation. It would have looked daringly effective on—say, Miss Lee White in an Alhambra burlesque. On little Million it would have a vulgarity not to be described in words. I'd thought I'd guided her safely away from it! And now this!

"Yes, you see I thought better of buying that gown," said the heiress, flushed but defiant. "You see, you were wrong about those very bright shades not being the c'rect thing; why, look at what that Lady Golightly-Long had got on her back! Red and green and blue trimmings, and I don't know what all, all stuck on at once. And she ought to know what's what, if anybody did," Million persisted, "c'nsidering she's a Earl's cousin and one of the Highest in the Land!"

"Certainly one of the longest," I said, thinking of those unending lissom limbs swathed in the Futurist draperies of that cobra-woman.

Million went on to inform me, impressively, that this lady, too, was "a Perfeshional." Does classic dancing, they call it. Needn't do it for her living, of course. But she says she's 'wrapped up in the Art of it.' Likes to do what she likes, I s'pose she means.

"She's got a lovely home of her own, Miss Vi Vassity told me, in Aberdeenshire.

"Not only that, but a big bungalow she has near the river. Sometimes she has down parties of her own particular friends to watch her dancing on the lawn there, in the moonlight. And, Smith!" Here Million gave a little skip out of her skirt, "What jer think?"

"What?" I asked, as I drew the cerise frock from its wrappings. (Worse, far worse than in the shop. Still, I'd got to let her wear it, I suppose. And it may be drowned by Miss Vi Vassity's voice at the supper-table.)

"Why, she's going to ask me down there, too, to one of her week-end parties! Think o' that! An invitation to visit! Some time when Mr. Burke's going. He often goes to the house. All most artistic, he told me; and a man-cook from Vienna. Fancy!" breathed Miss Million. "Fancy me stayin' in a house like that!"

I took up her ivory brushes and began to do her hair.

"You're very quiet to-night," said Million. "Didn't you enjoy your afternoon out?"

"Oh, yes. Quite, thank you," I said rather absently.

I was longing to have the room to myself, with peace and quiet to put away Miss Million's things—and to think in. To think over "my afternoon out," with its unexpected encounter, its unexpected conversation! And to meditate over that other surprise that I'd found waiting for me at the end of it.

At last Miss Million was dressed. I put the beautiful mother-o'-pearl, satin-lined wrap upon her shoulders, sturdily made against the flaring, flimsy, cerise-coloured ninon.

"Needn't wait up for me," said my mistress, bright-eyed as a child with tremulous excitement over this new expedition. "I'll wake you if I can't manage to undo myself. Don't suppose I shall get back until 'the divil's dancin' hour,' as that Mr. Burke calls it. He'll be waitin' for me now, downstairs."

Really that young man lives a life of contrasts!

Tea with Miss Million's maid! Dinner and supper with Miss Million herself!

I wonder which he considers the more amusing bit of light opera?

"Pity I can't take you with me to-night, really ... seems so lonely-like for you, left in this great place and all," said the kind-hearted little Million at the door. "Got something to read, have you?"

"Oh, yes, thanks!" I laughed and nodded. "I have got something to read."

CHAPTER XVI

A WORD OF WARNING

And as the door shut behind my mistress I took that "something to read" out of its hiding-place behind my belt and my frilly apron-bib.