The Chauffeur and the Chaperon | Page 3

called, striving, in that irritating way saints
have, to be cheerful in spite of all. "It's better than nothing. We can
invest it."
"Invest it!" I screamed. "What are two hundred pounds and a
motor-boat when invested?"
Evidently she was doing a sum in mental arithmetic. After a few
seconds' silence she answered bravely----
"About twelve pounds a year."
"Hang twelve pounds a year!" I shrieked. Then something odd seemed
to happen in my inner workings. My blood gave a jump and flew up to
my head, where I could hear it singing--a wild, excited song. Perhaps it
was the Eau de Cologne, and not being used to it in my bath, which
made me feel like that. "I shan't invest my motor-boat," I said. "I'm
going a cruise in it, and so are you."
"My darling girl, I hope you haven't gone out of your mind from the

blow!" There was alarm and solicitude in Phil's accents. "When you've
slipped on your dressing-gown and come out we'll talk things over."
"Nothing can make me change my mind," I answered. "It's been made
up a whole minute. Everything is clear now. Providence has put a
motor-boat into our hands as a means of seeing life, and to console us
for not being Captain Noble's heiresses, as Mrs. Keithley wrote we
were going to be. I will not fly in Providence's face. I haven't been
brought up to it by you. We are going to have the time of our lives with
that motor-boat."
The door shook with Phil's disapproval. "You do talk like an
American," she flung at me through the panel.
"That's good. I'm glad adoption hasn't ruined me," I retorted. "But
could you--just because you're English--contentedly give up our
beautiful plans, and settle down as if nothing had happened--with your
type-writer?"
"I hope I have the strength of mind to bear it," faltered Phyllis. "We've
only had two days of hoping for better things."
"We've only lived for two days. There's no going back; there can't be.
We've burned our ships behind us, and must take to the motor-boat."
"Dearest, I don't think this is a proper time for joking--and you in your
bath, too," protested Phil, mildly.
"I'm out of it now. But I refuse to be out of everything. Miss Phyllis
Rivers--why, your very name's a prophecy!--I formally invite you to
take a trip with me in my motor-boat. It may cost us half, if not more,
of your part of the legacy; but I will merely borrow from you the
wherewithal to pay our expenses. Somehow--afterwards--I'll pay it
back, even if I have to reëstablish communication with heavenly
shop-girls and villainous duchesses. Oh, Phil, we'll get some fun out of
this, after all. Anyhow, we shall go on living--for a few weeks. What
matter if, after that, the deluge?"

"You speak exactly as if you were planning to be an adventuress," said
Phyllis, coldly.
"I should love to be one," said I. "I've always thought it must be more
fun than anything--till the last chapter. We'll both embark--in the
motor-boat--on a brief but bright career as adventuresses."
With that, before she could give me an answer, I opened the door and
walked out in my dressing-gown, so suddenly that she almost pitched
forward into the bath. Phyllis, heard from behind a cold, unsympathetic
door, and Phyllis seen in all her virginal Burne-Jones attractiveness,
might as well be two different girls. If you carried on a conversation
with Miss Rivers on ethics and conventionalities and curates, and
things of that kind from behind a door, without having first peeped
round to see what she was like, you would do the real Phil an injustice.
There is nothing pink and soft and dimpled about Phyllis's views of life
(or, at least, what she supposes her views to be); but about Phyllis in
flesh and blood there is more of that than anything else; which is one
reason why she has been a constant fountain of joy to my heart as well
as my sense of humor, ever since her clever Herefordshire father
married my pretty Kentucky mother.
Phil would like, if published, to be a Sunday-school book, and a
volume of "Good Form for High Society" rolled into one; but she is
really more like a treatise on flower-gardens, and a recipe for making
Devonshire junket with clotted cream.
Not that she's a regular beauty, or that she goes in for any speciality by
way of features or eyelashes, or hair, or a figure, or anything really
sensational of that sort, as I do in one or two directions. But there's a
rose and pearl and gold-brown adorableness about her; you like her all
the better for some little puritanical quaintnesses; and if you are an
Englishman or an