pounds!" he echoed in his crisp, un-English accent. "Five? Any
good to me? My dear cousin Nellie, that's no more good to me than a
tissue-paper sunshade would be under a waterspout. No, five pounds would
be most emphatically not any good to me. Nor ten pounds. Nor twenty
pounds. I am not asking for a day's carfare and luncheon ticket. I tell
you, my dear little girl, it is _money_ I want!"

Miss Million stared at him rather indignantly this time. I didn't dream
of leaving her at this juncture.

I waited and I watched, without troubling to conceal my interest from
these two young people. I felt I had to listen to what would happen
next.

"Money?" repeated Miss Million, the heiress. "However much do you want,
then?"

"Thousands of dollars," announced the young American in his grave, sober
voice.

There came into the bright grey eyes of Miss Nellie Million an angry
look that I had once seen there when an unwise milk-boy had tried to
convince our thrifty little maid-of-all-work that he had given her
sixpennyworth instead of the bare threepennyworth that filled the
little cardboard vessel which she held in her hand! For I believe that
at the bottom of her heart "little Million" is still as thrifty, still
as careful, still as determined that she won't be "done"!

In the matter of clothes she has, of course, allowed herself for once to
loose her firmly screwed-on little dark head.

But now that the trousseau of new clothes is bought the brief madness
had left her. She is again the same Million who once said to me at home:
"Extravagant! That is a thing I could never be!"

In a voice of the old Million she demanded sharply of the quite
prosperous-looking, well-dressed and well-fed young man in front of her:
"Whatever in the wide world would you do with all that money, supposing
you had it?"

"Well, I should not waste it, I guess," retorted the young man. "In
fact, it would be put to a considerably bigger purpose than what it
would if you had kept it, to buy yourself candies and hair-ribbon and
whatever you girls do with money when it gets into your little hands. I
want that money," here his voice grew more serious than before, "for an
Object!"

"I want that money for an object," repeated Miss Million's American
cousin. And then he went on, at last, to tell us what "the object" was.

It took a long time. It was very complicated. It was full of technical
terms that were absolute Greek to me, as well as to Million. Th