Million, and find out about her being now a young lady of leisure—and—well, that might be the beginning of things! So I smiled at him and added in my most friendly voice, "Would you like me to give you the address?" It was at this moment—this precise moment before [Pg 38] he'd even had time to answer—that Aunt Anastasia, back from her visit to her friend, came up the tiny garden path behind him. [Pg 38] Yes, and this was the scene that met her gaze: her niece, her poor brother's child, Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter (who had already been reproved for forgetting that she belonged to "our family"), standing at the front door of her abode to repeat the offence for which she had been taken to task—namely, "talking to one of the impossible people who live about here!" The way in which Aunt Anastasia stalked past the young man was more withering than the most annihilating glance she could have given him. our family To me she said, in a voice that matched her look: "Beatrice, come into the house." I went into the drawing-room. She followed me. Then the storm broke! Of all the many "rows" I've had since I came to live with Aunt Anastasia, this did, as Million would have said, "take the bun." "Beatrice!" She threw my name at me as if it had been a glove thrown in my face. "Beatrice! Little cause as I have to think well of you, I did at least trust you!" "You've no reason, Auntie," said I, holding myself as stiff as she did (which was pretty ramroddy). "You've no reason not to trust me." "What?" A bitter little laugh. "No sooner is my back turned, no sooner have I left you alone in the house, than you betray my confidence. How do [Pg 39] I find you, after all that I said to you only the other evening on this same subject? Standing there on the doorstep, just as if you'd been poor Million, poor little gutter-bred upstart, preparing to receive——" [Pg 39] "I wasn't 'preparing to receive' anybody!" hotly from me. "No?" with icy satire from Aunt Anastasia. "You were not even going to ask the young man in? You stood there, like a
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