Now, isn't that the real,
old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon chivalry? It would just appeal to me."

"I don't think it would appeal to Miss Million," I said, "to have a
perfectly strange young man suddenly making his appearance in the middle
of--wherever she is, with a box full of all sorts of her things, and
saying he is her cousin! No, I shall have to go," I said.

And then a sudden awful thought struck me. How far could I go on the
money that was left to me? Three and sixpence!

"My goodness! What's the railway fare from Victoria, or wherever you go
to Lewes from? I don't believe I have got it!" I turned to the young man
with a resigned sigh of desperation. "I shall have to borrow from you,"
I said.

"With great pleasure," said the young American promptly. Then, with a
twinkle, he added swiftly: "See here, Miss Smith. Cut out the railroad
business altogether. Far better if you were to permit me to take you
down by automobile. Will you let me do that, now? I can hire an
automobile and tear off a hundred miles or so of peaceful English
landscape before anybody has had time to say 'How very extraordinary!'
which is the thing they always are saying in England when any remark is
put forward about what they do in the States. Pack up my cousin's
contraptions to-night, will you? To-morrow morning, at nine or eight or
seven if you like, we'll buzz out of this little old town and play
baseball with all the police traps between here and Brighton! Does this
appeal to you?"

I could not help feeling that this did very considerably appeal to me.

If I went with this un-English, unconventional, but kind and helpful
young man, I should at least not feel such a lone, lorn female, such a
suspect in the eyes of the law! I could rise superior to the dogging of
detectives, just as I had risen superior to them this evening in the
Embankment Gardens.

Suffragists and college-educated girls and enlightened persons of that
sort may say what they choose on the subject of woman becoming daily
more self-reliant and independent of man.

But I don't care. The fact remains that to the average girl-in-a-scrape
the presence of man, sympathetic and efficient, does still appear the
one and only and ideal prop!

Bless Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago! I was only too thankful to accept
the offer of his escort--and of his car!

Before he left me I had arranged to meet him at a certain garage at nine
o'clock in the morning.

"Bright and early, as we m