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 [Pg 32] more-favoured girl—I feel as if I'd lost my only friend.

[Pg 32]

I also feel as if it were at least a couple of years since it all happened. Yet it is only three days since Million and I went down to Chancery Lane together to interview the old lawyer person on the subject of her new riches. I shall never forget that interview. I shall never be able to forget the radiant little face of Million at the end of it all, when the kind old gentleman offered to advance her some of her own money "down on the nail," and did advance her five pounds in cash—five golden, gleaming, solid sovereigns!

"My godfathers!" breathed Million, as she tucked the coins into the palm of her brown-thread glove.

She'd never had so much money at once before in the whole course of her twenty-three years of life. (I've never had it, of course!) And the tangible presence of those heavy coins in her hand seemed to bring it home to Million that she was rich, more than all the explanations of her old lawyer about investments and capital.

I saw him look, half-amusedly, half-anxiously, at the little heiress's flushed face and the gesture with which she clenched that fist full of gold. And it was then that he began to urge upon us that "Miss Million" must find some responsible older person or persons, some ladies with whom she might live while she made her plans respecting the rearrangement of her existence.

To cut a long story short, it was he, the old lawyer, who suggested and arranged for "Miss Million's" next step. It appears that he has sisters "of a reasonable [Pg 33] age" (I suppose that means about a hundred and thirty-eight) who are on the committee of a hostelry for gentlewomen of independent means, somewhere in Kensington.

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