OUT ON BAIL
There!
The much-dreaded ordeal is over.
That is, it is over for the present. For we have been committed for trial, and that trial is still to come.
We shall have to go on living somehow under a cloud of the blackest suspicion. But there's one ray of comfort that I find among the inky gloom of my (mental) surroundings.
At least, there isn't going to be any more prison cell for us to-night! At least, I shall have a long and perfect and much-needed sleep in my delightfully luxurious white bed at the Hotel Cecil.
For that's where we've returned for the day, to pack up a few more things before we accept Miss Vi Vassity's kindly invitation and return to the "Refuge"—a refuge indeed!
It's too good of her to welcome two suspect characters such as my young mistress and me among her professional friends.
The Breathing Statue, the Boy-Impersonator, the Serio, the emerald-green-tighted Acrobat Lady—these all dwell on the heights of respectability as far as their private characters are concerned.
Of course, Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, is an arrant flirt, but a girl may be that and a model of propriety at the same time. This touch of nature never fails to exasperate, for some reason, any of the men who know her. The Ventriloquist's wife and the understudy to "Cigarette" in the Number Eleven Company of "Under Two Flags," there isn't a single word to be said against any of them!
But what are we?
Two alleged jewel thieves, out on bail! And even then Mrs. Rattenheimer protested loudly in court against "those two young women" being given bail at all!
By that time Miss Million and I were so utterly crushed by all that had gone before that I verily believe neither of us felt that we deserved to be let out at large—no, not even though three of our friends were sureties for us to the tune of £300 each!
I have come to the conclusion that it takes a born criminal to act and look like a perfectly innocent person when charged with a crime!
It's the perfectly innocent person who looks the picture of guilt!
At least I know that's what poor little Miss Million looked like as she stood beside me in the dock this morning.
Her little face was as white as her handkerchief, her grey eyes were shrunk and red with crying and want of sleep. Her hair was "anyhow." Her small figure seemed more insignificant than ever.
All the confidence with which she'd faced the wardress last night seemed to have evaporated in those hours of wakeful tossing on that vilely uncomfortable prison bed. She trembled and shook. She held on to the bar of the dock just as a very sea-sick passenger holds on to the steamer rail. She picked at her gloves, she nervously smoothed the creases in her pink, Bond Street tub-frock.
When the magistrate addressed her she started and gulped, and murmured "Sir" in the most utterly stricken voice I ever heard.
Altogether, if ever a young woman did look as if her sins had found her out, Miss Nellie Million, charged with stealing a valuable ruby pendant, the property of Mr. Julius Rattenheimer, looked the part at that moment.
I don't wonder the magistrate rasped at her.
As for me, I don't think I looked quite as frightened. You can't be at the same moment frightened and very angry.
I felt like murder; whom I should have wished to murder I don't quite know—the owner of the ruby alone would not have been enough for me. I was inwardly foaming with rage over having been forced into this idiotic position; also for having been made, not only mentally, but physically and acutely uncomfortable.
This is only one detail of the discomfort, but this may serve to sum up the rest; for the very first time in the whole of my life I'd had to go without my morning bath, and to stand fully dressed, but with the consciousness of being untubbed and unscrubbed, facing the world!
There was such a horrible lot of the world to face, too, in that awful police-court, where the windows were steaming and opaque, and the walls clammy as those of an uncared-for country vestry!
The place seemed crowded with all sorts and conditions of men and women, lumped together, so to speak, in Fate's lucky-bag. And it was only after I'd given two or three resentful glances about that stuffy cave of a place that I recognised among all the strangers the faces of the people who'd come to back up Miss Million and me.
First and foremost, of course, there sat, as close to us as she could manage to get herself placed, the sumptuous, peg-top-shaped, white-clad figure of London's Love, Miss Vi Vassity, with her metallic hair.
She kissed her plump hand to us with effusion, waving encouragingly to us with her big gold mesh bag and all its glittering, clashing attachments: the cigarette case, the lip-salve tube, the gold pencil, the memorandum tablets, the Darin powder-box, the card-case, the Swastika, the lucky pig, the touchwood, the gold-tipped coral charm, the threepenny bit, and all the other odd things that rattled and jingled together like a pedlar's cart, making an unearthly stir in court.
From where I stood I could see two men sketching the owner of all this clatter!
Close beside her sat Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, very boyish, very grave; his well-cut Dana-Gibson mouth seeming to be permanently set into the exclamation, "Preppassterous!" and his serious eyes fastened on his trembling little cousin in the dock.
The Honourable James Burke sat behind them. All the policemen and officials, I noticed, were being as pleasant and deferential to that young scamp as if he were at least a judge, instead of a person who ought by rights to be locked up in the interests of the public!
To the right of him sat the author of all our troubles, Mr. Julius Rattenheimer.
I suppose all German Jews aren't odious! I suppose all German Jews aren't thick-nosed and oily skinned, with eyes like two blackberries sunk very deep in a pan of dough! I suppose they don't all run to "bulges" inside their waistcoats and over their collars, and above and below their flashing rings? I suppose they don't all talk with their hands?
No, I suppose it isn't fair to judge the whole race by one specimen.
He became wildly excited during the proceedings. Four or five times he interrupted the reading of the charge. He gesticulated, pointing at Miss Million, and crying: "Yes! Yes! She's in the pay of this udder one. Do you see? This girl Smith, that we find out has an assumed name, vot? Easy to see who is the head of the firma——
"Yes; she is the beauty vot would not have her boxes looked at. Coming to a hotel mit empty boxes, vot does that look like, yes? Two young girls, very shabby, and presently tog demselves out in the most sexbensive clothes. How they get them, no?"
The magistrate broke in severely with something about "What Mr. Rattenheimer had to say would be attended to presently."
"I say get the girl, and do not let her to be at large whoever say they will pay for her. Get this woman Lovelace; she is the one we want," vociferated the awful little Hebrew; a little later on I think it was, but the whole police-court scene is one hideous confusion to me now. "Don't let her to esgabe through our hands, this girl, Beatrice Lovelace——"
My name, my real name, seemed to echo and resound all through that dreadful place. I didn't know before that I had always, at the bottom of my heart, been proud of the old name.
Yes! Even if it has been brought down to belonging to a family of nouveaux-pauvres, who are neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. Even if it is like having a complete motoring-kit, and no earthly chance of ever possessing a motor to wear it in!
Even so, it's a name that belonged to generation after generation of brave fighters; men who have served under Nelson and Wellington, Clive and Roberts!
It's their blood, theirs and that of the women who loved them, that ran hot and angry in my veins to-day, flushing my cheeks with scarlet fury to hear that name profaned in the mouth of a little stuttering, jewel-grabbing alien, who's never had a sword, or even a rifle, in his hand!
I turned my indignant eyes from him. And my eyes met, across the court, the eyes of another woman who wears the name of Lovelace!
Heavens! There was my Aunt Anastasia, sitting bolt upright in the gallery and listening to the case. Her face was whiter than Million's, and her lips were an almost imperceptible line across it!
How did she know? How had she come there? I didn't at that moment realise the truth—namely, that the Scotland Yard officials had been busy with their inquiries, not only at what Miss Million calls the Hotel "Sizzle," but also at what used to be my home at No. 45 Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.
Poor Aunt Anastasia, hearing that her niece was "wanted by the police" for robbery, must have received a shock forty times worse than that of my letter informing her that I had become our ex-servant's maid!
But, as I say, here she was in court ... seeing the pair of us in the dock, listening to the account of the circumstances that really did look black against us.
Oh, that unfortunate flight of Miss Million's into Sussex! That still more unfortunate flight of her maid's after her, leaving no address!
Aunt Anastasia, in pale horror, was listening to it all. That was the last straw.
It seemed to me nothing after that when, from where I stood tense in the dock, I recognised in the blurred pink speckle of faces against the grimy walls of the court the face of another person that I knew.
A blonde, manly face, grave as that of the young American, but with a less unself-conscious gravity.
The face of Mr. Reginald Brace, the manager of Miss Million's bank, who wants to be the manager of me—no! I mustn't make these cheap jokes about the steady and sterling and utterly English character of the young man who loves me and who wishes—still wishes!—to marry me.
For he has behaved in a way that ought to take any wish to make jokes about him away from any girl!
He has been so splendid—so "decent"!
You know, when bail was asked for, he stepped forward—he who is usually so deliberate in his movements!—quite as quickly as the Honourable Jim. How he—the Honourable Jim—had £300 to dispose of at a moment's notice is one of these mysteries that I suppose I never shall solve.
Still, he is one of the sureties for us, and my Mr. Brace is another. The third is Miss Vi Vassity, who produced, "to dazzle the old boy," a rustling sheaf of notes and a sliding, gleaming handful of sovereigns from the gold mesh bag, as well as her blue cheque-book and a smile that was a perfect guarantee of opulence.
Let me see, what came next? We were "released," of course, and I remember standing on the pavement outside the doors of that detestable place, I still holding Miss Million mechanically by the arm and finding ourselves the centre of a group of our friends.
The group surrounding us two criminals on the pavement outside the police-court consisted of Miss Vi Vassity, who was very showy, cheery, and encouraging; Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, very protective of his cousin; the Honourable James Burke; Mr. Brace, and one or two theatrical people who had recognised London's Love, and had come over to exchange loud greetings with her.
On the outskirts of this talking, gesticulating crowd of people there appeared a tall, rigidly erect feminine figure in grey tweed, and a black hat that managed to be at the same time unutterably frumpy and "the hat of a lady."
It was, of course, the hat of my Aunt Anastasia. Over the upholstered shoulder of Miss Million's American cousin I caught her eye. I then saw her thin lips pronouncing my name:
"Beatrice."
I moved away from Mr. Burke, who was standing very close to me, and went up to her. What to say to her I did not know.
But she spoke first, in the very quiet, very concentrated tone of voice that she always used in the old days when I was "in for a row."
"Beatrice, you will come home with me at once."
It was not so much an order as a stated fact. People who put their wishes in that way are not accustomed to be disobeyed.
My Aunt Anastasia didn't think for one moment that I should disobey her. She imagined that I should at once leave this crowd of extraordinary people, for I saw her glance of utter disapproval sweeping them all! She imagined that I should return with her to the little nouveau-pauvre villa at Putney and listen like a lamb to all she had to say.
Six months ago I should have done this, of course. But now—too much had happened in between. I had seen too many other people, too many aspects of life that was not the tiny stereoscopic view of things as they appear to the Aunt Anastasias of this world.
I realised that I was a woman, and that this other woman, who had dominated me for so long, had no claim upon me now.
I said gently and quietly, but quite firmly: "I am very sorry, Aunt Anastasia, but I can't come just now."
"What do you mean, Beatrice?" this icily. "You don't seem to see that you are singularly fortunate in having a home still open to you," said my aunt. "After the disgrace that you have brought, this morning, upon our family——"
"What's all this? What's all this?" broke in the cheerful, unabashed voice of Miss Vi Vassity.
That lady had broken away from her theatrical friends—young men with soft hats and clean-cut features—and, accompanied by her usual inevitable jingle of gold hanging charms and toys and knick-knacks—had turned to me.
She caught my arm in her plump, white-gloved hand and beamed good-naturedly upon my frozen aunt.
"Who's your lady friend, Smithie, my dear?" demanded London's Love, who had never looked more showily vulgar.
The grimy background of street and police-court walls seemed to throw up the sudden ins-and-outs of her sumptuous, rather short-legged figure, topped by that glittering hair and finished off by a pair of fantastically high-heeled French boots of the finest and whitest kid.
No wonder my fastidious aunt gazed upon her with that petrified look!
London's Love didn't seem to see it. She went on gaily: "Didn't half fill the stalls, our party this morning, what, what? Might have been 'some' divorce case! Now for a spot of lunch to wash it all down. We're all going on to the Cecil. Come on, Jim," to Mr. Burke.
"Come on—I didn't catch your boy's name, Miss Smith—yours, I mean," tapping the arm of Mr. Reginald Brace, who looked very nearly as frozen as my aunt herself. "Still, you'll come. And you, dear?"
This to no less a person than Miss Anastasia Lovelace.
"This is my aunt, Miss Lovelace," I put in hurriedly. "Aunt Anastasia, this is Miss Vassity, who, as you said, was kind enough to—to go bail for us just now in court——"
The bend of my aunt's neck and frumpy hat towards Miss Vi Vassity was something more crushingly frigid than the cut direct would have been.
Still London's Love took it all in good part; holding out that plump white paw of hers, and taking my aunt's untendered hand warmly into her own.
"Pleased to meet you," she said heartily. "Your little niece here is a great pal o' mine. I was sorry to see her in a mess. Shockin' naughty girl, though, isn't she? Nickin' rubies. Tut, tut. Why didn't you bring her up better, eh?" suggested England's Premier Comedienne.
There are absolutely no words to describe the deepening of the horror on poor Aunt Anastasia's face as she looked and listened and "took in" generally the society in which her only niece found herself!
Miss Vi Vassity's loud, gay tones seemed to permeate that group and that situation just as a racing wave ripples over pebbles and seaweed and sand-castles alike.
"Girls will be girls! I never intend to be anything else myself," announced the artiste joyously. "You're coming along with her, Miss—Lovelace, is it? Pretty stage name that 'ud make, boys. 'Miss Love Lace,' eh? Look dandy on the bills. You'll sit next your young niece here, and see she don't go slipping any of the spoons off the table inside her camisole. You never know what's going to go next with these kleptomaniacs. Er—hur!"
She gave a little exaggerated cough. "I'll have to keep my own eye on the other jewel thief, Nellie Million—d'you know her?"
Here I saw my aunt's cold, grey eye seeming to go straight through the face and form of the girl who used to be her maid-of-all-work.
Miss Million, in her rather crushed but very "good"-looking pink linen gown, held her small head high and glared back defiantly at the woman who used to take her to task for having failed to keep a wet clean handkerchief over the butter-dish. She (my mistress) seemed to gain confidence and poise as soon as she stood near the large, grey-clad figure of her American cousin.
All through this the voice of Miss Vi Vassity rippled on. "I'd better introduce the gentleman. This is Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, the inventor. I don't mean 'liar.' One o' those is enough in a party, eh, Jim? This is the Honourable Mr. James Burke, of Ballyneck Castle. This is Mr. Brace. Now we're all here; come along——"
"Thank you very much, but I think I will say 'Good morning,'" broke in my aunt's most destructively polite tones. "Come, Beatrice. I am taking my niece with me."
Here there occurred that of which I am sure Miss Million has often dreamed, both when she was a little, twenty-pound-a-year maid-of-all-work and lately, since she's been the heiress of a fortune.
She struck!
She, once dependent upon every order from those thin, aristocratic lips of Miss Anastasia Lovelace's, gave her own order to her own ex-mistress.
"Very sorry, Miss Lovelace, but I can't spare your niece to go with you just now," she announced, in her "that-settles-it" sounding Cockney accent. "I want her to change me for luncheon.
"Friday is her afternoon out," enlarged Miss Million, encouraging herself with an upward glance into the grave, boyish, American face of her cousin, and speaking more authoritatively still. "I can't have her gallivanting off to you nor to any one else just this minute. It's not convenient. She's my maid now, you see——"
My aunt's glance was that of a basilisk, her tone like the cut of a whip, as she retorted coldly: "My niece has nothing more to do with you. She will leave you at once. She is no longer in your—your grotesque service."
"My service is as good as yours was, and a fat lot better, I can tell you, Miss Lovelace," riposted my mistress, becoming suddenly shrill and flushed. "I give the girl sixty pounds a year, and take her about with me to all my own friends, same as if she was my sister.
"Yes. You needn't look like that because I do. Ask her. The first time in her life she's ever had a good time is now, since she's been working for some one that does realise that a girl's got to have her bit of fun and liberty same as everybody else, be she duchess or be she lady's-maid!"
"She is a lady's-maid no longer," said my Aunt Anastasia, in a voice that shook. The others looked fearfully uncomfortable, all except Miss Vi Vassity, who seemed to be hanging with the keenest enjoyment upon every syllable that fell from the lips of the two "opposing parties."
"My niece is no longer a lady's-maid," repeated Aunt Anastasia. "She leaves your service here and now."
"Not without notice," said the stubborn Million, in a voice that brought the whole of our inconvenient little Putney kitchen before my mental gaze. Verily she had recovered from her bad attack of stage-fright in court just before.
"A girl's got to give her month's notice or to give up a month's wages," said my Aunt Anastasia with a curling lip. "That is easily settled. My niece is in no need of a month's wages from some one who is—charged with common theft——"
"Why, she's 'charged' herself, as far as that goes!" Million gave back quickly. "If I've taken that old ruby, my maid knows all about it, and she's in it with me! You heard for yourself, Miss Lovelace, what that old Rattenheimer said in there just now. It's her he suspects—your niece! It's her he didn't want to let go, bail or no bail!"
What a wrangle!
It was a most inappropriate place for a wrangle, I know. But there they still stood and wrangled in the open street outside the police-station, ex-mistress and ex-maid, while passers-by stared curiously at them, and I and the three young men stood by, wondering what in the world would be said next.
"A month's wages, too!" repeated my young mistress, with the snorting laugh with which she used to rout the butcher-boys of Putney.
"It's a fat lot more than a month's wages that's doo from your niece to me, Miss Lovelace, and so I tell you! Two quarters' salary. That's what I've advanced my maid, so's she could get herself the sort of rig-out that she fancied. First time in her life the girl's been turned out like a young lady."
Here Miss Million waved a hand towards my perfectly cut black, taking in every detail from the small hat to the delight-giving silk stockings and suède shoes.
"Yes, for all her aristocratic relations they never done that for her—why, you know what a pretty girl you said she was, Vi"—turning upon London's Love, who nodded appreciatively.
"Well, you wouldn't ha' known her if you'd seen her in any old duds like she used to have to wear when she was only 'my niece'"—here a vindictive and quite good imitation of my Aunt Anastasia's voice.
"Now there's some shape in her"—this is good, from Million, who's picked up everything about clothes from me!—"and who's she got to thank for it? Me, and my good wages," concluded my mistress, with unction. "Me, and my thirty pounds that I advanced her in the first week. She can't go——"
"I don't want to!" I put in, but Miss Million grimaced me into silence. She meant to have her say, her own, long-deferred say, out.
"She can't go without she pays up what's owing to me first," declared my mistress triumphantly. "So what's she going to do?"
This certainly was a "poser" to poor Aunt Anastasia.
Full well I knew that she had not thirty pounds in the world that she could produce at a moment's or even at a month's notice.
Her tiny income is so tied up that she cannot touch the capital. And I know that, careful as she is, there is never more than twelve pounds between herself and a pauper's grave, so to speak.
I saw her turn a little whiter where she stood. She darted at me a glance of the deadliest reproach. I had brought her to this! To being worsted by a little jumped-up maid-servant!
Million, I must say, made the most of the situation. "There y'are, you see," she exulted. "Your niece has gone and spent all that money. And you haven't got it to reimburse it. You can't pay up! Ar! Those that give 'emselves the airs of being the Prince of Wales and all the Royal Family, and there's nothing they can't do—they ought to make sure that they have something to back it up with before they start!"
So true! So horribly true—poor Aunt Anastasia!
She said in her controlled voice: "The money shall certainly be paid. I will write."
I saw her face a mask of worry, and then she turned away.
As she walked down the street towards the Strand again, I saw her sway once, a little.
"Oh," I exclaimed involuntarily, "she ought not to walk. I don't believe she's well. She ought not to be alone, perhaps——"
And I turned to the young man to whom I suppose I have a right to turn, since he has asked me to marry him. At that moment I felt that it was such a comfort he was there; steady and reliable and conscientious.
"Mr. Brace!" I appealed to him a little shyly. "If you would be so kind! I wonder if you would mind—I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to take my aunt home?"
"Oh—er—yes, I should be delighted," said Mr. Brace quickly, but flushing all over his blonde face and looking suddenly and acutely miserable.
It was a great astonishment to me that the young man wasn't off to carry out this wish of mine before it had finished leaving my lips. Still, it wasn't his fault at all. Oh, no; I see his point of view quite well.
"That is—Do you think, perhaps, that your aunt might not find it distasteful to be addressed by me? You see the last time she spoke to me, it was—er—not on the friendliest terms, and—er——"
"Aw, look here, Mr. Brace, don't you worry!" broke in the joyously, matter-of-fact voice of London's Love. "You stay with your young lady and come on to lunch. Her aunt's being attended to all right without you. Look at that!"
"That" was certainly an unexpected scene towards which Miss Vi Vassity waved her tightly gloved hand.
I gazed in wonder in that direction.
There, on the pavement at the end of the turning into the Strand, stood the scraggy, erect, grey-clad, frumpily hatted figure of my Aunt Anastasia. And beside her, close beside her, was the Honourable James Burke! He must have broken away from the group almost at the moment that she did, and gone up to her.
What could he have said?
The "cheek" of that man! Is there anybody that he wouldn't mind tackling?
For he was leaning confidentially towards my so forbidding aunt. He was talking fluently to her about something. He was smiling down at her—I caught the curve of his cheek in profile.
And—could it be true?—my Aunt Anastasia actually didn't mind him!
I only saw her back; but you know how expressive backs can be. And the usually rigid, flat shoulders with the Victorian corset-ridge, and the lady-like waist and scarcely existent hips of my aunt were positively expressing mollification, friendliness, gratification!
"The old girl's all right with Jim to look after her," said Miss Vi Vassity, cheerfully to me, adding, with a large wink: "What worked the trick with her was the cue 'Ballyneck Castle,' I bet you. Me and Nellie and the rest of us weren't quite class enough for her ladyship. But you can't go wrong with these old Irish kings! So little known about 'em. Eh, Hiram? There! Milord has got a taxi for Auntie Lovelace"—which was surprisingly true.
"Got off with her, hasn't he?" laughed London's Love. "S'prised at her at her time o' life. Still, there's no fool like an old fool. I ought to know; nothing at 85 can resist little Me. Now, then, lunch at last. I guess you're all fairly perishing."
We were.
But there was one picture that remained with me even after we all got to the Cecil and the whole party—including Miss Million's maid—were sitting greedily concentrating upon the menu at one of the round tables in the big dining-room.
This was the picture of my Aunt Anastasia whirling towards Putney in that taxi—she who never, never can afford the luxury of a cab!—accompanied by the Honourable James Burke!
What would that drive be like? What would that unscrupulous young Irishman say to her, and she to him?
Would she ask him into No. 45? And—would he go?
Would she ask questions about her niece, Miss Million's maid, and would he answer them?
Oh! How I long to know these things! My wish for that is so keen that it causes me to forget even the black fog of suspicion under which my mistress and I will have to move while we are still "on bail." How I wish the Honourable Jim would hurry up and come back, just so that I could hear all about his tête-à-tête with my aunt!
But as it is, there's plenty to occupy me. A delicious lunch before me to make up for no dinner the night before, and a prison breakfast this morning!
At the head of the table Miss Vi Vassity, with her stream of comment as cheering and bright as the Bubbley in our glasses, which she insisted on standing all round! Beside me my very eligible and nice would-be fiancé, Mr. Reginald Brace, a young man that any girl ought to be glad to be sitting next.
I don't mean "ought," of course. I mean "would." I was, I know.
Mr. Brace was so kind, and tried all the time to be so sympathetic and helpful. I shall never forget his goodness. And he was really most apologetic about not having rushed to help Aunt Anastasia the minute I said anything about it.
"You see, I really think she would have preferred not to speak to me," he said. Then anxiously: "You are not annoyed with me, Miss Lovelace? You don't feel I could have done anything else?"
"Of course, you couldn't," I said.
"It seems too bad, the first time you asked me to do anything," he muttered over his plate. "I who want so to do things for you."
"Oh, please don't," I said quickly.
He said: "I am afraid you are a little annoyed with me, Beatrice——"
"Indeed I'm not," I protested through all the racket of Vi Vassity's talk above the pretty flowery table, "only——"
"Only what?"
"Well, I don't think I said you might call me that," I said, colouring.
He lowered his voice and said earnestly: "Are you going to say I may? I know it's not yet quite a week since I asked you. But couldn't I have my answer before that? I want so to take you away from all these people."
There was an expression of the most ungrateful disgust on his fair, Puritan sort of face as he turned it for a moment from me to that of the bubbling-over music-hall artiste who was his hostess.
"None of these people are fit," he declared resentfully, "to associate with you."
"You forget that plenty of people might not think I was fit to associate with! A girl who is arrested for jewel robbery!"
"Your own fault, Miss Lovelace, if I may say so! If you hadn't been here with Miss Million"—another ungrateful glance—"this suspicion wouldn't have touched you."
"If I hadn't brought Miss Million here, it wouldn't have touched her!"
"That has nothing to do with it," he said quite fretfully. Men generally are fretful, I notice, when women score a point in common sense.
It's so unexpected.
"The question still is—Are you going to make me the happiest man in the world by marrying me?"
It's odd what a difference there is between one's first proposal of marriage—and one's second!
Yes! Even if they are from the same man, as mine were. The first time is much the better.
A girl is prouder, more touched by it. She is possessed by the feeling "Ah, I am really not worth all this! I don't deserve to have a really splendid young man thinking as much of me as Dick, or Tom, or Harry, or Reginald, or whoever it is does."
I am only an ordinary sort of girl. I'm not one quarter as pretty, or as nice, or as sweet-tempered, or as affectionate, or as domesticated, or as good with my needle, or as likely to make a good wife as thousands of other girls who would be only too glad to have him!
Yet it's me he chooses. It's me he loves. It's me he called "The One Girl in the World for Him."
That may be a little obvious, but, oh, how wonderful! Even if a girl didn't want to say "Yes" the first minute she was asked, she simply couldn't help feeling pleased and flattered and uplifted to the seventh heaven by the mere fact that he'd proposed.
Some girls never get a proposal at all. I'm really fearfully lucky to have him look at me!
That's the first time, my dears.
As for the second time—well! I can only go by my own feelings with regard to Mr. Reginald Brace.
And these are: Well! He must like me dreadfully much to have proposed to me so soon again. He must adore me! I suppose I must be rather nice to look at, since he thinks I am "beautiful."
It's very nice and kind of him to want to marry me at once; very gratifying. But why does he want to take me away from the society of a whole lot of amusing friends, because he thinks they are "not good enough" for me?
Is he so much better? Is he? He may have a less Cockney voice, and a less flamboyant style of good looks than Miss Vi Vassity and her theatrical friends.
But he can't have a kinder heart. Nobody could. And he hasn't any quicker wits—that I've seen for myself.
It was magnificent of him to come to the court and to go bail for Miss Million and me directly he heard that we were suspected of robbery.
But, still——He must have known that we were innocent. Miss Million is a client of his, and he knows all about my people. I think a good deal of him for sticking to us. But I should have despised him if he hadn't. I like him. But, after all, when a girl says she'll marry a man, she means, or ought to mean, that he appeals to her more than any man she's ever met in her life.
It means she's sure she never will meet a man she could like more. It means he's the type of looks she likes, the kind of voice she loves to listen to, all the mental and physical qualities that call, softly, to something in her, saying:
"Here! Come to me. Come! It may be to settle down for life in a tiny suburban villa with one bed of calceolarias in the back garden and the kitchen range continually out of sorts. It may be to a life of following the drum from one outpost of the Empire to another. It may be to a country rectory, or to a ranch in Canada—"
I don't know what put the idea of a Canadian ranch into my head. But lots of people do marry into them.
"—or to a house in Park Lane, or to a bungalow in India. But wherever it is, wherever I am, that's home! Come!"
At least, ought one to feel like that, or oughtn't one? I don't know. Life and love are very complicated and confusing matters—especially love.
I told Mr. Brace so. This was just as we were rising from the luncheon-table. I said hurriedly: "I can't answer you. I really must have more time to think it over."
His fair Puritan's face fell at this, and he looked at me reproachfully.
"More time?" he said discontentedly. "More time still?"
"Yes. I—I'm sure it's most important," I said earnestly. "Everybody ought to have lots and lots of time to think it over before they dream of getting engaged. I'm sure that's the right thing."
And then our party broke up, for Miss Vi Vassity was going on to a theatrical garden fête to sell boxes of nougat with a signed photograph of herself on the lid, and Mr. Hiram P. Jessop wanted to take his cousin out into the park for a long talk about his aerial bomb-dropper, he said, and Mr. Brace had to get back to the bank.
Miss Million said I could go out for a breath of air if I wanted, but I had to return to Miss Million's rooms upstairs and to set things a little bit in order there, as well as packing up for our next flight to the "Refuge."
Perhaps the Honourable Jim may call and tell me how he got on with my Aunt Anastasia?
No! There has been no sign of him all the afternoon. It has gone quietly and slowly. My talkative friend, the telephone girl, threw me a smile and a glance only a little sharper than usual as I crossed the hall. The hurrying page-boys in brown, the porters look just the same as usual; the coming and going of the American visitors is the same.
Life here in the big hotel seems resumed for me exactly where it was broken off the day that Miss Million's disappearance coincided with the disappearance of the celebrated Rattenheimer ruby. Ugh!... Except for my ineffaceable memories of last night and this morning in the police-court there's nothing to remind me that my mistress and I are still in that horrible and extraordinary situation, "out on bail."