perfectly what she meant. I braced myself to be firm, and took the bull by the horns.

"I shan't have to 'put on' anything, you see," I explained. "I shall always be just as I am in this black frock and this darling little frilly apron, and the cap that I really love myself in. You can't say it doesn't suit me, Mill——, Miss Million."

The scandalised Million stared at me as we stood there in her hotel bedroom; a sturdy, trim little dark-haired figure in her new princesse petticoat that showed [Pg 83] her firmly developed, short arms, helping me to put away the drifts of superfluous tissue-paper that had enwrapped her trousseau. I myself had never been so well dressed as in this dainty black-and-white livery.

[Pg 83]

She exclaimed in tones of horror: "But you can't sit down to afternoon tea with two young gentlemen in your cap and apron!"

"Of course not. I shan't be sitting down with them at all."

"What?"

"I shan't be having tea with you in the drawing-room," I explained. "Naturally I shall not appear this afternoon."

"Wha—what'll you do, then?"

"What does a good lady's-maid do? Sit in her bedroom, sorting her mistress's new lingerie and sewing name-tapes on to her mistress's silk stockings——"

"What! And leave me alone, here?" remonstrated my mistress shrilly. "Me sit here by myself with those two young gentlemen, one of them a Honourable and a perfect stranger to me, and me too nervous to so much as ask them if they like one lump or two in their cups of tea? Oh, no! I couldn't do it——"

"You'll have to," I said. "Ladies'-maids do not entertain visitors with their employers."

"But——'Tisn't as if I was an ordinary employer! 'Tisn't as if you was an ordinary lady's-maid!"

"Yes, it is, exactly."

"But—they'll know you aren't. Why, that young Mr. Reginald Brace, him from the bank, he knows as well as you do who you are at home!"

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