"Oh, Jasper!" sobbed Lady Standish.
"'Twould be interesting to know," further trumpeted Lady Maria, "which of these gentlemen is supposed to have run away with the widow Bellairs?"
"Oh, Kitty!" sobbed Lady Standish.
"My God!" said Sir Jasper, laying down his reeking glass and hardly believing his eyes.
Mistress Kitty (seated between O'Hara and Stafford at the end of the table, while Lord Verney and Sir Jasper faced each other), continued, unmoved, to sip her fragrant brew and cocked her wicked eye at the newcomers, enjoying the situation prodigiously. She laid an arresting hand upon the cuffs of her neighbours, who, all polite amazement, were about to spring to their feet. "Keep still," said she, "keep still and let Sir Jasper and his lady first have their little explanation undisturbed. Never intermeddle between husband and wife," she added demurely: "it has always been one of my guiding axioms!"
"Well, Sir Jasper Standish, these are pretty goings on!" cried Lady Maria, "for a three months' husband.... (Hold up, my poor dear Julia!) Profligate!" snorted the old lady, boring the baronet through with one gimlet eye. "Dissolute wretch! highwayman!"
"I demand," fluted Lady Standish's plaintive treble (in her gentle obstinate heart she had come to the fixed resolution of never allowing Sir Jasper out of her sight again), "I demand to be taken back to my mother, and to have an immediate separation."
"Running away with women out of the streets of Bath!—A lady," (sniff) "supposed to be engaged to my nevvy! Poor deluded boy——"
"And my dearest friend!—oh, Jasper! How could you?"
Sir Jasper broke in upon his wife's treble with the anguished roar of the goaded: "The devil take me," cried he, "if I don't think the whole world's going mad! I elope with the widow Bellairs, Lady Maria, ma'am? I treacherous, my Lady? Ha!" He positively capered with fury and wounded feeling and general distraction, as he drew the incriminating documents from his breast, and flourished them, one in each hand, under the very nose of his accusers. "What of Red Curl, madam? What of the man who kissed the dimple, madam? What of your lover, madam!"