Million would be so overwhelmed that she would look as if she had a whole mine full of stolen rubies sewn into the tops of her corsets. She has a wild and baseless horror of anything to do with the police. (I saw her once, at home, when a strange constable called to inquire about a lost dog. It was I who'd had to go to the door. Million had sat, shuddering, in the kitchen, her hand on her apron-bib, and her whole person suffering from what she calls "the palps.")
So this was going to be awkward, hideously awkward.
Yet I couldn't go out in search of her!
I said, desperately: "What am I to do about it?"
"There is only one thing for it as far as I can see," said the young American thoughtfully; "you will have to let me go down with a suit-case full of lady's wearing apparel. You will have to let me make all the inquiries in Lewes."
"You? Oh, no! That is quite impossible," I exclaimed firmly. "You could not."
"Why not? I tell you, Miss Smith, it seems to me just to meet the case," he said earnestly.
"Here's this little cousin of mine, that I have never yet seen, that I've got to make friends with. I am to be allowed to make her acquaintance by doing her a service. Now, isn't that the real, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon chivalry? It would just appeal to me."
"I don't think it would appeal to Miss Million," I said, "to have a perfectly strange young man suddenly making his appearance in the middle of—wherever she is, with a box full of all sorts of her things, and saying he is her cousin! No, I shall have to go," I said.
And then a sudden awful thought struck me. How far could I go on the money that was left to me? Three and sixpence!