"You haven't heard from him, Miss Million?" I suggested. "You haven't seen anything of him since he went off after lunch the day I came over with your cousin?"
"I tell you what it is, Smith. You have got a down on him! Always had, for some reason," said Miss Million quite fretfully. She got up from the chair in front of the looking-glass and stood, a defiant little sturdy figure in the new crepe-de-chine nightie with the big silken "M" that I had embroidered just over her honest heart. "You are always trying to make out that the Hon. Mr. Burke is not to be trusted, or somethink. I am sure you are wrong."
"What makes you so sure of that?" I asked rather ruefully.
"Well, it isn't likely I should take a fancy to any one I didn't think I could trust," said Miss Million firmly. "And as for his not having been here this last day or two, well! I don't think anything of that. A gentleman has got his business to attend to, whatever it may be. Hasn't he?"
I said nothing.
"I am not fretting one bit just because he has not been to see me," maintained Miss Million stoutly, in a way that convinced me only too well how her whole heart was set upon the next time she should see the Hon. Jim. "It would not surprise me at all if he just turned up for that picnic on the cliffs that we are all going to to-morrow. I know Vi told him he could come to that. I bet he will come. And in those tales," added Miss Million, "it is very often at a picnic that the hero chooses to go and ask the young lady to marry him!" She concluded with an inflection of hope in the voice that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had said was so pretty.
Poor Mr. Jessop! He may win Million's fortune for his aeroplane invention. But good-bye to his chances of the heiress herself if the Hon. Jim does turn up to-morrow.
The Hon. Jim Burke did turn up. But not at the picnic, exactly.... Let me tell you about it from the beginning. The picnic was to take place on the cliffs near Rottingdean. Some of the "Refugettes" walked, looking like a band of brightly dressed, buoyant-spirited schoolgirls on a holiday. Two of the party, namely, Mr. Jessop and his cousin, my mistress, motored in the little two-seater car that he had kept on to stay with him in Lewes. Others had hired donkeys, "for the fun of the thing." Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, and her friend, the Boy-Impersonator, had been very sweet and friendly in their offers to me to join the donkey-riding party. But for some reason I felt I wanted to be quiet. I had one of those "aloof" moods which I suppose everybody knows. One feels not "out of tune" with one's surroundings, and disinclined for conversation. The girls and Miss Vi Vassity and my mistress and the one man at the picnic, namely, Mr. Jessop, all seemed to me like gaily coloured pictures out of some vivacious book. Something to look at! After the noisy, laughing lunch, when the party had broken up into chattering groups of twos and threes, and were walking farther down the cliffs, I felt as if I were glad that for a few minutes this gay and amusing book could be closed. I didn't go with any of them. I pleaded tiredness. I said I would stay behind and have a little rest on the turf, in the shadow of Miss Vi Vassity's bigger car that had brought over the luncheon things.
The party melted away. I watched them disappear in a sort of moving frieze between the thymy turf and the hot, blue sky. Then I made a couch for myself of one of the motor-rugs and a gay-coloured cushion or two. I had taken off my black hat and I curled myself up comfortably in a long reverie. My thoughts drifted at last towards that subject which they accuse girls' thoughts (quite unjustly!) of never leaving.
The subject of getting married! Was I or was I not going to get married? Should I say "Yes" or "No" to Mr. Brace when that steady and reliable and desirable young Englishman returned from Paris, and came to me for his answer? Probably "Yes." There seemed no particular reason why it should not be "Yes." I quite like him, I had always rather liked him. As for him, he adored me in his honest way. I could hear again the unmistakable earnestness in his voice as he repeated the time-honoured sentiment, "You are the one girl in the world for me!"