s, with the man's bicycle
leaning up against the white palings. We were a curious trio! The young
mistress in a pink linen frock, the young lady's-maid in black, and the
"plain-clothes man" giving a quick glance from one to the other as he
announced in his clear but quiet and expressionless voice: "I have to
arrest you ladies----"

"Arrest!" gasped Miss Million, turning white. I grasped her hand.

"Don't be silly, my dear," I said as reassuringly as I could, though my
voice sounded very odd in my own ears. Million looked the picture of
guilt found out, and I felt that there was a fatal quiver in my own
tone. I said: "It's quite all right!"

"I have to arrest you ladies," repeated the man with the bicycle, in his
wooden tone, "on the charge of stealing Mr. Julius Rattenheimer's ruby
pendant from the Hotel Cecil----"

"Oh, I never! I never done it!" from Million, in anguished protest. "You
can ask anybody at the Orphanage what sort of a----"

"I have to warn you that anything you say now will be used in evidence
against you," concluded the man from Scotland Yard, "and my orders are
to take you back with me to London at once."

CHAPTER XXIX

LOCKED UP!

WHO could ever have anticipated this?

Who would have dreamt, a night or two ago, of where Miss Million, the
American Sausage-King's heiress, and her aristocratically connected
lady's-maid would have had to spend last night?

I can hardly believe it myself, even yet.

I sit on this perfectly ghastly little bed, narrow and hard as any stone
tomb in a church. I gaze round at the stone walls, and at the tiny
square window high up; at the tin basin, chained as if they were afraid
it might take flight somehow; at the door with the sliding panel; the
ominous-looking door that is locked upon me!

And I say to myself, "Vine Street police-station!"

That's where I am. I, Beatrice Lovelace, poor father's only daughter,
and Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter! I've been taken up, arrested!

I'm a prisoner. I've slept--that is, I've not been able to sleep--in a
cell! I've been put in prison like a pickpocket, or a man who's been
drunk and disorderly, or a window-smashing suffragette!

Only, of course, the suffragette does her best to get into prison. She
doesn't mind. It's a glory to her. She comes out and "swanks" about in a
peculiarly hideous brooch that's been specially designed to show that
she'