iss Million's
dark plaits. If only she hadn't happened ever to meet that incorrigible
Jim Burke!

"You haven't heard from him, Miss Million?" I suggested. "You haven't
seen anything of him since he went off after lunch the day I came over
with your cousin?"

"I tell you what it is, Smith. You have got a down on him! Always had,
for some reason," said Miss Million quite fretfully. She got up from the
chair in front of the looking-glass and stood, a defiant little sturdy
figure in the new crepe-de-chine nightie with the big silken "M" that I
had embroidered just over her honest heart. "You are always trying to
make out that the Hon. Mr. Burke is not to be trusted, or somethink. I
am sure you are wrong."

"What makes you so sure of that?" I asked rather ruefully.

"Well, it isn't likely I should take a fancy to any one I didn't think I
could trust," said Miss Million firmly. "And as for his not having been
here this last day or two, well! I don't think anything of that. A
gentleman has got his business to attend to, whatever it may be. Hasn't
he?"

I said nothing.

"I am not fretting one bit just because he has not been to see me,"
maintained Miss Million stoutly, in a way that convinced me only too
well how her whole heart was set upon the next time she should see the
Hon. Jim. "It would not surprise me at all if he just turned up for that
picnic on the cliffs that we are all going to to-morrow. I know Vi told
him he could come to that. I bet he will come. And in those tales,"
added Miss Million, "it is very often at a picnic that the hero chooses
to go and ask the young lady to marry him!" She concluded with an
inflection of hope in the voice that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had said was so
pretty.

Poor Mr. Jessop! He may win Million's fortune for his aeroplane
invention. But good-bye to his chances of the heiress herself if the
Hon. Jim does turn up to-morrow.

The Hon. Jim Burke did turn up. But not at the picnic, exactly.... Let
me tell you about it from the beginning. The picnic was to take place on
the cliffs near Rottingdean. Some of the "Refugettes" walked, looking
like a band of brightly dressed, buoyant-spirited schoolgirls on a
holiday. Two of the party, namely, Mr. Jessop and his cousin, my
mistress, motored in the little two-seater car that he had kept on to
stay with him in Lewes. Others had hired donkeys, "for the fun of the
thing." Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, and her friend, the
Boy-Imperso