yet (if we ever get
out of this atrocious muddle about the stolen ruby) as her husband!

These two facts make all the difference....

And I should have said so to the Honourable Jim had we been alone.

It didn't really surprise me that he, in his turn, attempted to hold a
girl's hand under that rug.

Men always seem to do what they notice some other man doing first. That
must have been it. Except, of course, that it wasn't Miss Million's hand
that Mr. Burke tried to take. It was the hand of Miss Million's maid.

I was determined that he shouldn't. Firmly I drew my hand out of his
clasp--it was a warm and strong and comforting clasp enough, very
magnetic; but what of that?

Then I clasped my own hands tightly together, as I am doing now, and
left them on my lap, outside the rug.

The Honourable Jim seemed to tire, at last, of "batting" the detective
who was driving us. He leant back and began to sing, in a sort of
musical whisper.... Really, it's unfair that a man who has the gift of
such a speaking voice should have been granted the gift of song into the
bargain. They were just little snatches that he crooned, the sort of
scraps of verse with which he'd woken me up on the cliff that same
afternoon--bits of an Irish song called "The Snowy-breasted Pearl," that
begins:

"Oh, she is not like the rose
That proud in beauty blows----"

And goes on something about:

"And if 'tis heaven's decree
That mine she may not be----"

So sweet, so tuneful, so utterly tender and touching that--well, I know
how I should have felt about him had I been Miss Million, who three days
ago considered herself truly in love with the owner of this calling,
calling tenor voice!

Had I been Miss Million, I could not have sat there with my hand firmly
and affectionately clasped in the hand of another man, ignoring my first
attraction. No; if I had been my mistress instead of just myself, I
could not have remained so stolidly pointing out to the Honourable Jim
that all was indeed over.

I could not have refused him a glance, a turn of the head in the
direction of the voice that crooned so sweetly through the purring rush
of the car.

However, this was all--as Million herself would say--neither here nor
there. Apart from this Scotland Yard complication, she was Miss Million,
the heiress, drifting slowly but surely in the direction of an eligible
love affair with her Ame