"With Americans," said the green-tights-and-parrakeets lady impressively, "it's a fair puzzle to know what they are 'after'!"
She, I know, has toured a good deal in the States. So she ought to know what she is talking about. But Mr. Hiram P. Jessop is the only American of whom I can say that I have seen very much.
Each day he has driven over from Lewes, that drowsy old town with one pricked-up ear of a castle on a hill; and he spends hours and hours talking to the little cousin whom I really think he sincerely likes.
"And, mind you! I am not saying that I don't like him," Miss Million confided to me last night as I was brushing her hair. "Maybe I might have managed to get myself quite fond of him, if--if," she sighed--"I hadn't happened to meet somebody else first. I don't see any manner of use in getting engaged to one young man when it is another that you fancy. Simply asking for trouble, that is. Haven't I read tales and tales about that sort of thing?"
I sighed as I tied a bit of pink ribbon round the ends of Miss 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 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.