“I trust no one has ever been able to say of me that I am otherwise than strictly virtuous,” she thought, “but I can’t abide these prying prudes that think ’tis their business to show up any poor child that’s made a slip in her time.”
“And, ho, my Lady,” concluded Lydia, “they’ve kept it from Madame Mirabel, on condition that my niece resigns her situation.”
“Now, look here, Lydia, stop sniffing. If ’tis my poor dear Bellairs’s nephew that wronged the girl, I’ll see that he makes reparation. He shall marry her. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, I say! I’ll have the truth out of them both, and then I’ll join their hands, I swear it, before I’m two days older!”
Kitty was one of those whose plans are swiftly conceived and whose impatient spirit will not brook an instant’s delay in their execution. She sat down that very moment to write to her graceless relative.
“He must not guess,” she thought, as her quill ran with little squeaks and pauses—“he must not guess that he is to be brought to book, or my young gentleman will have a thousand good reasons for declining to present himself.”
“Dear Nephew Jocelyn,” wrote she, very silkily—“Pray come and visit me this next Thursday afternoon at three of the clock. It is a long time since we have met, and there is a little matter——”
Here Kitty stopped and nibbled at her pen. How could she bait the trap so that the fox should fall into it?
“a little matter which I wish to discuss with you. I think when you hear what it is, you will agree ’twas worth wasting half an hour on your attached aunt-in-law,
“Kitty Kilcroney.”
Kitty shook the pounce-box over the sheet, folded, superscribed, and affixed with a pat a knowing little wafer which bore the semblance of a rose with the touching motto: “Sweet unto death.”