He laughed. "Child," he said, "you have the prettiest obsolete vocabulary to be got anywhere outside Fielding. 'Unwomanly,' is it, to smoke? I don't know; I only know that nine out of ten women do it so badly I want to take the cigarette out of their fingers and pitch it into the grate for them! Clouds of smoke they puff out straight into your face till you'd think 'twas a fiery-breathing dragon in the room! And staining their fingers to the knuckle as if they'd dipped them in egg. And smothering themselves with the smell of it in a way no man manages to do--why, by the scent you'd scarcely tell if it was hair they'd got on their heads or the stuffing out of the smoking-room cushions! I can't ever understand how they get any man to want to----"
"Don't let your young mistress learn the cigarette habit, will you? By the way, you've contrived to improve the little Million in several ways since last I saw you."
So possibly he really had been paying serious court to the heiress. Yes; again I had the foreboding shudder. Complications ahead; what with the Honourable Jim and the Determined Jessop, and the Enamoured Million--to say nothing of the bomb-dropping machine and the fortune that may be lost!
"You look thoughtful, Miss Lovelace," said the fortune-hunter who doesn't know there may be no fortune in it. "Mayn't I congratulate you----"
"What?" I said, quickly looking up from the luncheon basket that I was repacking. I wondered where he might have heard anything about my Mr. Brace. "Congratulate me?"
"Why, on your achievements as a lady's-maid."
"Oh! Oh, yes. Very kind of you to say I had effected 'improvements,'" I said as bitingly as I could. "I suppose you mean Miss Million's hands that you were so severe about?"
Here my glance fell upon Mr. Burke's own hands, generally gloved.
They were so surprisingly out of keeping with the rest of his otherwise well-groomed and expensive appearance, for the nails were rough and worn; the fingers stumpy and battered and hard, the palms horny as those of a navvy.
"Yes! You think my own hands are no such beauties. Faith, you're right, child," he said, carelessly flicking the ash from his cigarette off against a flint. "I never could get my hands fit to be seen again after that time I came across as a stoker."