"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."
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's been sentenced to "one month," or whatever it was.
She's proud of it. Oh, how can she be? Proud of having spent so much time in a revolting place like this! "I think," gazing round hopelessly once more--"oh, I don't believe I shall ever be able to get the disgusting, bleak, sordid look of it out of my mind, or the equally sordid, bleak, disgusting smell of it out of my skirts and my hair!"
And I clasp my hands in my lap and close my eyes to shut out the look of those awful walls and that fearful door.
I go over again the scene yesterday down at the "Refuge," when we were arrested by that Scotland Yard man, and when I had just enough presence of mind to ask him to allow us, before we went off with him, to leave word with our friends.