This volunteer was the little heiress, who still kept, under all her new and silken splendour, the heart of the good-natured, helpful "little Million" from the Soldiers' Orphanage and the Putney kitchen.
I might have spared myself all my nervous anxiety about Lord Fourcastles! It seems a bad dream now.
She had motored off then and there with the head of the "Refuge," without even waiting to wire from town. Only when they neared their destination had she thought of sending off a message to me, with the address where I was to follow her. That message had probably been tossed into the hedgerow by the tramp to whom it had been hastily entrusted.
Hence my anxiety and suspense, which Miss Million declared had been nothing compared to her own!
Of course, people who have given terrible frights to their friends always insist upon it that it is they who have been the frightened ones!
But all this, of course, was what I picked up by degrees, and in incoherent patches, later on.
Many things had happened before I really got to the rights of the story. One scene after another has been flicked on to the screen of my experiences ... but to take things in order.
Perhaps I had better go back to where I was unpacking Million's things in the transformed farmhouse bedroom, and where I was confronted with a fresh anxiety.
Namely, that the wealthy and ingenuous and inexperienced Million really had fallen in love with that handsome ne'er-do-weel, Mr. James Burke.
"Have you?" I persisted. "Have you?"