Lady Oxford neither agreed nor denied. She admitted the truth of Mr. Kelly's statement in her own way.
'You bragged and blabbed to my worst enemy, to Lady Mary, with her poisonous pen,' and her fine features writhed with hatred as she spoke Lady Mary's name.
'There your ladyship was misled,' returned Kelly. 'My lips have been sealed, as I already had the honour to inform you. My Lady Mary may not love you, but she is innocent of this offence. If she wrote those rhymes, she was, indeed, more my enemy than yours; and my enemy, as your ladyship is aware, she is not.'
Lady Oxford understood the strength of the argument.
'Ah, yes,' she said thoughtfully. 'The apothecary's daughter!'
The contemptuous phrase slipped from Lady Oxford by mistake, and was not at all uttered in a contemptuous voice. But she had no doubt fallen into a habit of so terming the girl in her thoughts. None the less, however, it stung Mr. Kelly, who was at some trouble to keep his voice gentle. He knew how much Smilinda owed at this moment to the apothecary's daughter.
'The young lady to whom I conceive you refer, Miss Townley, is of a family as ancient, loyal, and honourable as your ladyship's own, and you may have seen on what terms both ladies were this evening. Moreover, Lady Mary was purely ignorant of Miss Townley's very existence when that pasquinade was written.'
'Then who wrote it?'
'Mr. Scrope, as I have the honour to repeat.'
'Scrope?' she answered in a quick question, as though for the first time she understood that George might well be right. He gave the reasons for his belief as he had given them at the Deanery to Nicholas Wogan. They were to the last degree convincing. Lady Oxford was persuaded long before Mr. Kelly had come to an end. A look came into her face which Kelly could not understand, a look of bitter humiliation. 'Scrope,' she muttered, as her fingers played with the cards upon the table. She overturned a card which lay face downwards on the table, and it chanced to be the knave of hearts.