Do anything for 'em; work my fingers to
the bone! But there's one thing they've got to do," said Miss Million
impressively. "They've got to be straight with me. I've got to feel I
can trust 'em, Smith. Once they've deceived me--it's all over. See?"

"Yes, I see," I said, feeling more puzzled than ever over the difference
between one person's outlook and another's. As far as I was concerned, I
felt that "trusting" and "liking" could be miles apart from each other.

I shouldn't change my whole opinion of a man because he had deceived me
about knowing my uncle, and because he had spun me a lot of "yarns"
about that friendship. Men were deceivers ever.

I, in Miss Million's place, should have shrugged my shoulders over the
unmasking of this particular deceiver, and I should have said: "What can
one expect of a man with that voice and those eyes?"

Evidently in this thing Million, whom I've tried to train in so many of
the little ways that they consider "the mark of a lady," is more
naturally fastidious than I am myself.

She said: "I don't mind telling you I thought a lot o' that Mr. Burke. I
thought the world of him. But that's----"

She gave a sort of little scattering gesture with her hands.

"Why, I can't begin to tell you the yards of stuff he's been telling me
about uncle and the friends they was! And now here it's all a make-up
from the beginning. He hadn't a word to say for himself. 'Jer notice
that, Smith?" said Miss Million.

"I expect he was ashamed to look any one in the face, after the way he'd
bin going on. Pretty silly I expect he felt, having us know at last that
it was all a put-up job." I had to bite my lips to keep back a smile.

For as Miss Million and I swung along the road that, widening, led away
from the downs and between hedges and sloping fields, I remembered
something. I remembered that tea at Charbonnels with the Honourable Jim.

It was there that he admitted to me, quite shamelessly, that he had
never, in the whole of his chequered career, set eyes upon the late
Samuel Million. It was then that he calmly remarked to me: "You'll never
tell tales." So that it's quite a time that I've known the whole
discreditable story....

Yes; I confess that in some ways Miss Million must have been born
much more scrupulous and fastidious than Lady Anastasia's
great-granddaughter!

"No self-respecting girl would want to look at him again, I shouldn't
think," concluded my young mistress firmly, as w