e," I explained with dignity. "I don't know what
you mean by your--I am in Miss Million's service. I am her maid!"

"Have some strawberries and cream. Really fine strawberries, these,"
interpolated the Honourable Jim. "What was I saying--you her maid?
Wouldn't it be just as sensible if I myself were to go and get myself
taken on as valet by that other young fellow that was sitting there at
tea in her rooms yesterday--the bank manager, or whatever he was?
Curious idea to have a deaf-and-dumb chap as a manager."

Here I really had to bite my lips not to laugh again. Certainly poor Mr.
Brace had descended, like Mr. Toots, into a well of silence for the
whole of that afternoon. I daresay he thought the more.

"When I heard at the Cecil that all those boxes and things belonged to
the very young lady with her maid, naturally enough I thought I knew
which of the two was the mistress," pursued the Honourable Jim in a sort
of spoken reverie, eating strawberries and cream with the gusto of a
schoolgirl. "Then when I came up and saw the wrong one waiting on the
other, and looking like a picture in her apron----"

"Please don't say those things to me," I interrupted haughtily.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't like it."

"It's a queer disposition the Lovelace women must be of, then. Different
from the others. To take offence? To shy at the sound of a man's voice
saying how sweet they look in something they've got new to wear? I will
remember that," said Mr. Burke, still in that tone of reverie. With
every word he spoke I longed more ardently to feel very angry with this
young man. Yet every word seemed to make genuine anger more impossible.
Sitting there over his strawberries and cream, he looked like some huge,
irresponsible, and quite likeable boy. I had to listen to him. He went
on: "Then when I saw you as the maid, I thought you'd just changed
places for a joke. I made sure 'twas you that were Miss Million."

"What?" I cried.

For now I really was angry.

It was the same kind of hot, unreasonable, snobbish anger that surged
all over me when Million (my mistress) began to lose her habit of saying
"Miss," and of speaking to me as if I'd come from some better world.
Utterly foolish and useless anger, in the circumstances. Still, there it
was. I flushed with indignation. I looked straight at the Honourable Jim
Burke as I said furiously: "Then you really took me--me!--for the niece
of that dreadful old--of that old man