“Oh, no, my dear,” said Lady Milmo, “kingdoms may fall and empires may decay, but Josephine never fails. A woman of her word, my dear. Don't you know what she did for La Guira, the singer? La Guira ordered four dresses to take away with her to Patagonia or somewhere. It was impossible to finish them before the morning of departure. Josephine herself raced with them to Waterloo in a hansom just in time to see the train with La Guira in it steam out of the station; and that woman took a special there and then, and chased the train and got the dresses on board all right. Josephine is a marvellous woman.”
Ella laughed. She did not care very much. Her life at that moment was too full.
“It's quite sweet of the sun to come in and see me, isn't it?” she said.
“Provided he keeps up his good behaviour to-morrow,” said Lady Milmo.
“Oh, I sha'n't mind what he does tomorrow; I shall have too many things to think of.”
“But what about us poor unfortunates who are not going to be married?”
“You could be married now, fifty times over, auntie, if you chose,” said Ella, out of her lightness of heart.
“The Lord preserve me!” replied Lady Milmo, vivaciously. “When poor Howgate died I vowed that when we met in heaven, if there is one, no other man should stand between us.”
As the late Sir Howgate Milmo, Bart., had been a notoriously evil liver, Ella did not think there was much chance of her aunt escaping forsworn, even on her hypothesis.
“One can love heaps of times, you know,” she said, stretching out her limbs girlishly and looking at the tips of her shoes.