uite flippantly. "You told him, I
suppose, about me bein' dark."

"He asked so many questions!" I said. "He really takes such an interest.
You ought to be flattered, Miss Million."

"I don't know that having interest taken in me by young gentlemen is any
such a rarity, just now!"

Here she reddened rather prettily.

I fastened the other cuff. Million went on, in a gush of artless
confidence: "To tell you the truth, Smith, I haven't half been getting
off lately. The other night, at the Thousand and One Club, who d'you
suppose was making a fuss of me? A lord, my girl!"

This she said, little dreaming that her maid had watched the whole of
this scene.

"And then, there's something else that's getting a bit more serious,"
said Million, bridling. "Turning up to-day, just because he'd guessed
where I'd got to, and all!"

"He? Which he?" I asked, with a quick feeling of dismay.

"It's what I call pointed," said Million, "the way he's been going on
ever since he's met me. Even if he is uncle's old friend, it's not all
on account of uncle that he makes hisself so agreeable. Oh, no! Marked,
that's what I call it. You know who I mean."

She nodded her dark head. She smiled as she spoke the name with a
shyness that suited her rather well.

"The Honourable Mr. Burke!"

"Million!" I said anxiously, as I folded the borrowed blouse I'd taken
off her, "Miss Million, do you like him?"

Miss Million's grey eyes sparkled. She said: "Who wouldn't like him?"

A pang seized me. A pang of the old apprehension that my little heiress
of a mistress might lose her heart to a graceless fortune-hunter!

I said, with real anxiety in my tone: "Oh, my dear, you don't think you
are going to fall in love with this Mr. Burke, do you?"

CHAPTER XXVI

MISS MILLION IN LOVE

AT last I have been allowed to get to the bottom of what this
extraordinary place, the "Refuge," really is!

It is no more a lunatic asylum, of course, than it is a nunnery.

It started life by being a big Sussex farmhouse.

Then some truly enterprising person took it on as a lodging-house for
summer visitors, also for a tea-garden for motorists.

Then it happened that England's premier comedienne, Miss Vi Vassity, who
was motoring through on her way from a week-end at Brighton, saw the
place. She fell in love with it as the fulfilment of one of her dreams.

It appeared that she has always wanted to