"Why, I can't begin to tell you the yards of stuff he's been telling me about uncle and the friends they was! And now here it's all a make-up from the beginning. He hadn't a word to say for himself. 'Jer notice that, Smith?" said Miss Million.
"I expect he was ashamed to look any one in the face, after the way he'd bin going on. Pretty silly I expect he felt, having us know at last that it was all a put-up job." I had to bite my lips to keep back a smile.
For as Miss Million and I swung along the road that, widening, led away from the downs and between hedges and sloping fields, I remembered something. I remembered that tea at Charbonnels with the Honourable Jim.
It was there that he admitted to me, quite shamelessly, that he had never, in the whole of his chequered career, set eyes upon the late Samuel Million. It was then that he calmly remarked to me: "You'll never tell tales." So that it's quite a time that I've known the whole discreditable story....
Yes; I confess that in some ways Miss Million must have been born much more scrupulous and fastidious than Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter!
"No self-respecting girl would want to look at him again, I shouldn't think," concluded my young mistress firmly, as we passed the first thatched cottages of a village.
I ought to feel inexpressibly relieved. For now all my fears regarding the Honourable Jim are at rest for evermore. He won't marry her for her fortune, for the simple reason that she won't have him! And she won't break her heart and make herself wretched over this perfidy of his, because a perfidious man ceases to have any attraction for her honest heart. That sort of girl doesn't, "while she hates the sin, love the poor sinner."
What a merciful dispensation!
It's too utterly ridiculous to feel annoyed with Million for turning her coat like this. It's inconsistent. I mustn't be inconsistent. I must trample down this feeling of being a little sorry for the blue-eyed pirate who has been forced to strike his flag and to flee before the gale of Miss Nellie Million's wrath.
I ought, if anything, to be still feeling angry with Mr. James Burke on my own account: teasing me about ... pairs of gloves and all that nonsense!