Pamela pinched her lips.
“Well, if it isn’t Providence! I’ve got in that bandbox a head!—a head, I say, my Lady, roses dew-dropped with Strass, and just a twist of silver net illusion—if it ain’t Providence!”
Perhaps Miss Lydia Pounce had assisted Providence in this matter. That admirable abigail had her wits all about her.
The three charming ladies held their breath while the nimble young milliner went down on one knee and began to unfasten the cordings of the larger bandbox. Scarcely had her fingers reached the palpitating stage of tissue paper, when the door was flung violently open, and Lord Kilcroney marched into the room. He came in with a great swing of coat-tails and stamp of high boots, and it was plain to see, by other tokens—his flaming eye, his dilated nostril, his clenched jaw—that he was in a towering rage.
The ladies fell apart, with the movement of scared birds under the dash of the hawk. Even Kitty cowered in her chair, though only for a second. Before the gathering wrath exploded, she had reared her pretty head in defiance, and was ready to meet him with a temper-flash as stormy as his own.
He flung on the table an open letter—a fragrant, pink sheet it was, with coquettish wafer still attached—and pinning it with his finger, asked in a voice, hoarse and trembling from his efforts to control it: “Is this a forgery, my Lady, or is it a bad joke?”
Kitty glanced down at the scrap of paper, marked with her own delicate caligraphy, in the latest thing in violet inks; then, her hotly-resentful gaze contradicting the ice-cold mockery of her accents: “I marvel, my Lord, that you can find a joke in what is to me so monstrous sad.”
“I say it’s a bad joke, a blanked, ill-bred, devilish bit of cattiness!”
“Oh, pray, pray!” tittered my Lady on the edge of hysterical fury. “Remember you are not in the bosom of your family, Denis. Here are witnesses——”
“Witnesses, is it? I’ve nothing to hide, I’d have it called by the town crier. The letter which a wife was not ashamed to send to her husband may be sung up and down the parade, for all I care! Listen to this, Nan Day: you led your husband a pretty dance once upon a time, but split me, you stopped short of public insult! Listen, Lady Flora. All the world knows what a treasure Dare-Stamer has in you and how ’tis the good humour of the world you have with him, and the patience! Here’s a message for a wife to write to her husband: