In her heart she told herself that the young man showed a prodigious want of savoir-vivre. In all candour he proceeded to display a still greater lack of that convenient quality.
"On the other hand, had I fallen, and that indeed was the more likely contingency, it being my first affair of the kind, I tremble to think in what state my soul would have appeared before its Maker." His voice quivered a moment.
"My Lord Verney," cried Kitty, turning upon him a most distressed countenance, "you have no idea how you shock me!"
And indeed he had not.
He took her distress for the sweetest womanly sympathy, and was emboldened to further confidence.
"I blush to tell you," he said, "that since I came to this gay Society of Bath, my life has not been all my conscience could approve of. The pious practices, the earnest principles of life so sedulously inculcated in me by my dear mother, have been but too easily cast aside."
"Oh dear!" cried Kitty in accents of yet greater pain.
"When we are married, my dear love," pursued Lord Verney, quietly encircling his mistress's little waist with his arm as he spoke, but, absorbed as he was in his virtuous reflections, omitting to infuse any ardour into his embrace, "we shall not seek the brilliant world. We shall find all our happiness with each other, shall we not? Oh, how welcome my dear mother will make you at Verney Hall! It has always been her dream that I should marry early and settle on the estate."
Little shivers ran down Kitty's spine. "Is it your intention to live with your mother when you are married?" she faltered, and leaned weakly against the inert arm.
Enthusiastically he cried that the best of mothers and he could never be parted long.