The child, who had maintained a solemn observant silence during the whole proceeding, her great eyes roaming from one person to another, while she contentedly sat on Pamela’s lap, now looked up into her friend’s face with a roguish smile.
“Tell the pretty lady.”
“Tell you,” said the child.
“Well, then, tell Pamela.”
But with the perversity of its sex and years, the child was here seized with overwhelming giggles and buried its head in Pamela’s skirt.
Kitty was staring with her mouth and eyes open, while a dawning sense of something utterly ludicrous and amazing showed itself on her face.
“If her Ladyship will kindly tax her memory,” Pamela spoke in ineradicable bonnet-shop phraseology—“to the extent of recollecting that I met Mr. Bellairs for the first time on the doorstep of this house but eighteen months ago, she will realise that——”
“Enough! Enough!” cried Kitty.
She waved her hand, fell back into her arm-chair, pressing her filmy handkerchief to her lips, trying to check her peals of laughter. Perhaps she was not quite so overwhelmed with merriment as she pretended. Perhaps she felt that the only way of mitigating the supreme ridicule of her situation was by being the first to laugh at it.
As her patroness laughed, Pamela waxed serious, while Jocelyn Bellairs stood scarlet and indignant, the picture of offence and injured rectitude.