Victoria looked as suddenly distressed as a small child whose doll has been taken away.
"I can't make you out, Millie. There's something making you unhappy."
She looked up with a touching, anxious expression at the girl, whose face was dark with some stormy trouble that seemed only to bring out her loveliness the more, but was far indeed from the happy, careless child Victoria had once known.
Millie's face changed. She suddenly flung herself down at her friend's feet.
"Victoria, darling, I don't want you to marry that man. No, I don't, I don't indeed. He's a bad man, bad in every way. He only wants your money: he doesn't even pretend to want anything else. And when he's got that he'll treat you so badly that you'll be utterly wretched. You know yourself you will. Oh, don't marry him, don't, don't, don't!"
Victoria's face was a curious mixture of offended pride and tender affection.
"There, there, my Millie. Don't you worry. Whoever said I was going to marry him? At the same time it isn't quite true to say that he only cares for my money. I think he has a real liking for myself. You haven't heard all the things he's said. After all, I know him better than you do, Millie dear, and I'm older than you as well. Yes, and you're prejudiced. You never liked him from the first. He has his faults, of course, but so have we all. He's quite frank about it. He's told me his life hasn't been all that it should have been, but he's older now and wiser. He wants to settle down with some one whom he can really respect."
"Respect!" Millie broke out. "He doesn't respect any one. He's an adventurer. He says he is. Oh, don't you see how unhappy you'll be? You with your warm heart. He'll break it in half a day."
Victoria sighed. "Perhaps he will. Perhaps I'm not so blind as you think. But at least I'll have something first. I've been an old maid so long. I want—I want——" She brushed her eyes with her hand. "It's foolish a woman of my age talking like this—but age doesn't, as it ought, make as much difference."
"But you can have all that," Millie cried. "The Major's a good man and he does care for you, and he'd want to marry you even though you hadn't a penny. I know he seems a little dull, but we can put up with people's dullness if their heart's right. It seems to me just now," she said, staring away across the little sunlit room, "that nothing matters in a man beside his honesty and his good heart. If you can't trust——"