“What, the roses? How—did I still hold them? Oh, my Lady, the roses, ’tis they undid me!”
“Your roses undid you? Talk plain, in the name of common sense.”
“The roses undid me, Madam,” said Lady Selina, lifting up her head to grind her teeth at Kitty, as that lady said afterwards, for all the world like her little Denis at ten months old with the double ones coming. “How should I know that when the beautiful pink roses arrived they were not from Sir Jasper? and oh, my Lady, he came storming into my parlour, demanding to see me, and I scarce out of the hands of Monsieur Achille and going in to him in my wrapper, I do assure you, not knowing what prodigious important thing he had to say to me, and he, my Lady Kilcroney, scarce able to speak with the fierce rage. ‘The roses,’ he says, ‘where are the roses you was to wear to-night?’ And there they were, unpacked at his elbow before I had had time as much as to take them in my hand. As I’m a living woman, as I hope to be saved, my Lady, I, all innocence! ‘The roses?’ says I, and he falls upon them, and, oh, to think of it, in the very middle rose, hidden like a snake in the grass, was a billet. A billet, my Lady Kilcroney, I scarce know how to tell you—from——”
“Another gentleman?” screamed Kitty, jumping to the horrid truth.
“Some stranger.”
“And indeed I hope so, Miss. And what was wrote in it, pray?”
Selina dropped long white eyelids over those brilliant curious eyes of hers which never seemed to corroborate her lips, and, drawing an immense quivering sigh, the corners of the same pretty lips going down over a sob: “Oh, my Lady, the monstrous audacity of it,” she cried. “The creature wrote—God knows who he can be—
‘If you wear these roses to-night, Beauteous Selina, your adorer will know that; whatever happens, he may still hope.’”
“’Pon my word,” said Kitty.
“It seems Sir Jasper had had an anonymous letter——”