I pressed the sturdy short arm in my own with as much sympathy as I could show. "My dear! My dear Miss Million," I murmured, "I am so dreadfully sorry about it all----" "Sorry? How d'you mean sorry, Smith?" My unexpected little mistress turned sharply upon me. "Y'orter to be glad, I should think!" "Glad?" "Yes! About me being 'put wise,' as Hiram calls it, to something that I might have been going on and on getting taken in about," went on Miss Million as we started off to find the road over the downs. "If it hadn't ha' bin for my cousin and him meeting face to face, and him not able to deny what he'd said, I might ha' been to the end of the chapter believing every word I was told by that Mr. Burke. Did you ever know anything like him and the lies he's been stuffing me up with?" I stared at the real and righteous and dry-eyed anger that was incarnate in Million's little face as we walked along. I positively gasped over the--well, there's nothing for it but to call it the distaste and dislike of the one in which she pronounced those three words: "That Mr. Burke." "Whatcher looking so surprised at?" she asked. "You," I said. "Why--only yesterday you told me that you were so much--that you liked Mr. Burke so much!" "Yesterday. O' course," said Million. "Yesterday I hadn't been put wise to the sort of games he was up to!" "But----You liked him enough to say you--you were ready to marry him!" "Yes! And there'd have been a nice thing," retorted the indignant Million. "Fancy if I had a married him. A man like that, who stuffed me up with all those fairy tales! A nice sort of husband for anybody! I can't be grateful enough to Hiram for telling me." I was too puzzled to say anything. I could only give little gasps at intervals. "Isn't it a mercy," said Miss Million with real fervour, "that I found him out in time? Why ever d'you look at me like that? It is a mercy, isn't it?" "Yes. Yes, of course. Only I'm so surprised at your thinking so," I hesitated. "You see, as you really liked Mr. Burke----" "Well, but I couldn't go on likin' him after I found him out. How could I?" demanded Million briskly. "Would any girl?" I said: "I should have thought so. I can imagine a girl who, if she really cared for a man, would go on caring----" "After she found out the sort he was?" "Yes. She might be very unhappy to find out. But it wouldn't make any other difference----" "What?" cried Million, looking almost scandalised. "I don't believe you can mean what you say!" "I do mean what I say," I persisted, as we walked along. "I think that if one really cared for a man, the 'caring' would go on, whatever one found him out in. He might be a murderer. Or a forger. Or he might be in the habit of making love to every pretty woman he saw. Or--or anything bad that one can think of. And one might want to give up being fond of him. But one wouldn't be able to. I shouldn't."