The Honourable Jim seemed to tire, at last, of "batting" the detective who was driving us. He leant back and began to sing, in a sort of musical whisper.... Really, it's unfair that a man who has the gift of such a speaking voice should have been granted the gift of song into the bargain. They were just little snatches that he crooned, the sort of scraps of verse with which he'd woken me up on the cliff that same afternoon—bits of an Irish song called "The Snowy-breasted Pearl," that begins:
"Oh, she is not like the rose
That proud in beauty blows——"
And goes on something about:
"And if 'tis heaven's decree
That mine she may not be——"
So sweet, so tuneful, so utterly tender and touching that—well, I know how I should have felt about him had I been Miss Million, who three days ago considered herself truly in love with the owner of this calling, calling tenor voice!
Had I been Miss Million, I could not have sat there with my hand firmly and affectionately clasped in the hand of another man, ignoring my first attraction. No; if I had been my mistress instead of just myself, I could not have remained so stolidly pointing out to the Honourable Jim that all was indeed over.
I could not have refused him a glance, a turn of the head in the direction of the voice that crooned so sweetly through the purring rush of the car.
However, this was all—as Million herself would say—neither here nor there. Apart from this Scotland Yard complication, she was Miss Million, the heiress, drifting slowly but surely in the direction of an eligible love affair with her American cousin.
I had nothing whatever to do with her rejected admirer, or how he was treated.
I was merely Miss Million's maid, Beatrice Lovelace, alias Smith, with an eligible love affair of her own on hand. How I wished my Mr. Reginald Brace could have been anywhere get-at-able! He would have been so splendid, so reliable!