Here, at the very door, I stopped. I had been checked by the hearty laugh of real boyish amusement that broke from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop at her last words.
"Five pounds!" he echoed in his crisp, un-English accent. "Five? Any good to me? My dear cousin Nellie, that's no more good to me than a tissue-paper sunshade would be under a waterspout. No, five pounds would be most emphatically not any good to me. Nor ten pounds. Nor twenty pounds. I am not asking for a day's carfare and luncheon ticket. I tell you, my dear little girl, it is money I want!"
Miss Million stared at him rather indignantly this time. I didn't dream of leaving her at this juncture.
I waited and I watched, without troubling to conceal my interest from these two young people. I felt I had to listen to what would happen next.
"Money?" repeated Miss Million, the heiress. "However much do you want, then?"
"Thousands of dollars," announced the young American in his grave, sober voice.
There came into the bright grey eyes of Miss Nellie Million an angry look that I had once seen there when an unwise milk-boy had tried to convince our thrifty little maid-of-all-work that he had given her sixpennyworth instead of the bare threepennyworth that filled the little cardboard vessel which she held in her hand! For I believe that at the bottom of her heart "little Million" is still as thrifty, still as careful, still as determined that she won't be "done"!
In the matter of clothes she has, of course, allowed herself for once to loose her firmly screwed-on little dark head.
But now that the trousseau of new clothes is bought the brief madness had left her. She is again the same Million who once said to me at home: "Extravagant! That is a thing I could never be!"
In a voice of the old Million she demanded sharply of the quite prosperous-looking, well-dressed and well-fed young man in front of her: "Whatever in the wide world would you do with all that money, supposing you had it?"