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276
AN AFRICAN MILLIONAIRE
276

'My child,' I said, 'why should I be angry? You may confide in me implicitly.' (With a blush like that, who on earth could be angry with her?)

'And you won't tell Aunt Amelia or Aunt Isabel?' she inquired somewhat anxiously.

'Not for worlds,' I answered. (As a matter of fact, Amelia and Isabel are the last people in the world to whom I should dream of confiding anything that Dolly might tell me.)

'Well, I was stopping at Seldon, you know, when Mr. David Granton was there,' Dolly went on; '—or, rather, when that scamp pretended he was David Granton; and—and—you won't be angry with me, will you?—one day I took a snap-shot with my kodak at him and Aunt Amelia!'

'Why, what harm was there in that?' I asked, bewildered. The wildest stretch of fancy could hardly conceive that the Honourable David had been flirting with Amelia.

Dolly coloured still more deeply. 'Oh, you know Bertie Winslow?' she said. 'Well, he's interested in photography—and—and also in me. And he's invented a process, which isn't of the slightest practical use, he says; but its peculiarity is, that it reveals textures. At least, that's what Bertie calls it. It makes things come out so. And he gave me some plates of his own for my kodak—half-a-dozen or more, and—I took Aunt Amelia with them.'