I found myself looking straight into those absurdly brilliant, dark-blue eyes, fringed by those ridiculously long black lashes of Miss Million's adored, the Hon. Jim. So he'd come!
Hastily I sat up, with my hands to my hair.
"It looks very nice as it is, Miss Lovelace," said the Hon. Jim gravely, with a curious twitch at the corners of his firmly cut mouth. "Tell me, now. Do you consider it a fair dispensation of Providence that all the domestic virtues should be of less avail to a girl in a sea-breeze than the natural kink in the chestnut hair of her?"
It is ridiculous, the way this young man always starts a conversation with some silly question to which there is absolutely no answer!
The only thing to be done was to ignore it! So I rose to my feet as primly as I could, and said: "Good afternoon! They will all be sorry that you came too late for the picnic. I believe Miss Vi Vassity has gone down there, to the left"—here I pointed towards the grey-blue sweep of distance cut by the mast of a wireless station somewhere near. "And Miss Million is with her."
The Hon. Jim said gently: "I was not really asking which way they had gone. What I really wanted to know is——"
Here he looked hard at me——"What has happened to—" here his voice changed again—"to the gentleman from the new, young, and magnificent country, where the girls are all peaches, and their lovers are real, virile, red-blooded, clean-limbed, splendid specimens of what the Almighty intended the young man to be, I guess?"
Try as I would, I could not keep my lips from quivering with laughter at the perfect imitation which Mr. Burke gave of the young man who was certainly worth ten of him in every way, even if he does not speak with the accent of those who have "come down" (and a good long way, too) from the Kings of Ireland.
"If you mean Mr. Jessop," I said distantly, "I think he went off with Miss Vassity and his cousin."
"Ah!" said the Hon. Jim, on a long-drawn note. "Oh! the cousin of the little Million, is he? Is that it? Does that account for it?"