I pressed the sturdy short arm in my own with as much sympathy as I could show.
"My dear! My dear Miss Million," I murmured, "I am so dreadfully sorry about it all——"
"Sorry? How d'you mean sorry, Smith?" My unexpected little mistress turned sharply upon me. "Y'orter to be glad, I should think!"
"Glad?"
"Yes! About me being 'put wise,' as Hiram calls it, to something that I might have been going on and on getting taken in about," went on Miss Million as we started off to find the road over the downs.
"If it hadn't ha' bin for my cousin and him meeting face to face, and him not able to deny what he'd said, I might ha' been to the end of the chapter believing every word I was told by that Mr. Burke. Did you ever know anything like him and the lies he's been stuffing me up with?"
I stared at the real and righteous and dry-eyed anger that was incarnate in Million's little face as we walked along.
I positively gasped over the—well, there's nothing for it but to call it the distaste and dislike of the one in which she pronounced those three words: "That Mr. Burke."
"Whatcher looking so surprised at?" she asked.
"You," I said. "Why—only yesterday you told me that you were so much—that you liked Mr. Burke so much!"