"You can't go on
living in Laburnum Grove now. You're a rich man's heiress----"

"Will that stop me living where I want? I'm all alone in the world,"
faltered Million, suddenly looking small and forlorn as she sat there by
the big desk. "You're the only real friend I got in the world, Miss
Beatrice. I always liked you. You always talked to me as if you was no
more a young lady than what I was. D'you think----" Her voice shook. She
seemed to have forgotten the presence of old Mr. Chesterton. "D'you
think I'd a-stopped so long with your Aunt Nasturtium if it hadn't been
for not wantin' to leave where you was? I'd be lost without you. I
shouldn't know where to put myself, Miss. Oh, Miss!" There was a sob in
her voice. "Don't say I got to go away from you! What am I to do with
myself and all that money?" There was a perplexed silence.

Million's lawyer glanced at me over his gold-rimmed glasses, and I
glanced back above Million's forget-me-not-wreathed hat.

It is a problem.

This little lonely, thrifty creature--brought up to such a different
idea of life--what is to be done about her now?

CHAPTER V

MILLION LEAVES HER PLACE

MILLION has gone!

She has left us, our little cheerful, and bonnie, and capable
maid-of-all-work who has become a millionaire pork-butcher's heiress!

Never again will her trim, aproned figure busy itself about our small
and shockingly inconvenient kitchen at No. 45. Never again will she have
to struggle with the vagaries of its range. Never again will she "do
out" our drawing-room with its disgraceful old carpet and its graceful
old cabinet. Never again will she quail under the withering rebuke with
which my Aunt Anastasia was wont to greet her if she returned half a
minute late from her evening out. Never again will she entertain me
with her stream of artless comments on life and love and her own
ambition--"Oh, Miss, dear, I should like to marry a gentleman!"

Well, I suppose there's every probability now that this ambition may be
gratified. Plenty of hard-up young men about, even of the Lovelace
class, "our" class, who would be only too pleased to provide for
themselves by marrying a Million, in both senses of the word.

Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W., will know her no more. And I, Beatrice
Lovelace, who was born in the same month of the same year as this other
more-favoured girl--I feel as if I'd lost my only friend.