then. When? For at any moment I am, by rights, at
Miss Million's beck and call. Her hair and hands to do; herself to dress
three times a day; her new trousseau of lovely garments to organise and
to keep dainty and creaseless as if they still shimmered in Bond Street.

I don't like the idea of "slipping out" in the evenings, even if my
mistress is going to keep dissipated hours with cobras and
sulphur-crested cockatoos. So--one thing remains to me.

It's all that remains to so many girls as young and as pretty as I am,
and as fond of their own way, but in the thrall of domestic service. Oh,
sacred right of the British maid-servant! Oh, one oasis in the desert of
subjection to another woman's wishes! The "Afternoon Off"!

Next Friday I shall be free again. I must write to Mr. Brace. I must
tell him that the "important matter" must wait until then....

But apparently it can't wait.

For even as I was taking up my--or Miss Million's--pen, one of those
little chocolate-liveried page-boys tapped at Miss Million's
sitting-room door and handed in a card "for Miss Smith."

I took it.... His card?

Mr. Brace's card?

And on it is written in pencil: "May I see you at once? It is urgent!"

Extraordinary!

Well, "urgent" messages can't wait a week! I shall have to see him.

I said to the page-boy: "Show the gentleman up."

I don't know what can be said for a maid who, in her mistress's absence,
uses her mistress's own pretty sitting-room to receive her--the
maid's--own visitors.

Well, I couldn't help it. Here the situation was forced upon me--I, in
my cap and apron, standing on Miss Million's pink hearthrug in front of
the fern-filled fireplace, and facing Mr. Brace, very blonde and
grave-looking, in his "bank" clothes.

"Will you sit down?" I said, standing myself as if I never meant to
depart from that attitude. He didn't sit down.

"I won't keep you, Miss Lovelace," said the young bank manager, in a
much more formal tone than I had heard from him before. "But I was
obliged to call because, after I had sent off my note to you, I found I
was required to leave town on business to-morrow morning early.
Consequently I should only be able to speak to you about the matter
which I mentioned in my note if I came at once."

"Oh, yes," I said. "And the important matter was----"

"It's about your friend, Miss Million."

"My mistress," I reminded him, fingering my apron.

The young man looked very uncomfortabl