He took her hand; bent and kissed her sedately.
"I will," said he, "go write the news to my mother."
"Oh go!" said she, and turned on her heel with a flounce and was out of his sight, round the corner of an ally, with a whisk and flutter of tempestuous petticoats, before his slow boy's wits had time to claim the moment for the next meeting.
There were actually tears in Mistress Kitty's eyes as she struck the gravel with her cane. She rubbed her cherry lips where his kiss had rested with a furious hand.
"'Twas positively matrimonial," she cried within herself, with angry double-threaded reminiscence—"the Calf! Did ever woman spend a more ridiculous hour—and in Heaven's name, what's to be done?"
SCENE XIV
Denis O'Hara appropriately lived in Gay Street. As all the world knows, Gay Street runs steeply from the green exclusiveness of Queen Square, to the lofty elegance, the columnal solemnity of the King's Circus. Being a locality of the most fashionable, Gay Street was apt to be deserted enough at those hours when Fashion, according to the unwritten laws of Bath, foregathered in other quarters.
Towards eight o'clock of the evening of the day after his duel with Sir Jasper, Mr. Denis O'Hara, seated at his open window, disconsolate in a very gorgeous dressing-gown and a slight fever fit, found it indeed so damnably deserted that the sight of a sedan-chair and two toiling chairmen coming up the incline became quite an object of interest to him.
"To be sure," thought he, "don't I know it's only some old hen being joggled home to roost, after losing sixpence and her temper at piquet? But what's to prevent me beguiling myself for a bit by dreaming of some lovely young female coming to visit me in me misfortune? Sure it's the rats those fellows are, that not one of them would keep me company to-night! There's nobody like your dear friends for smelling out an empty purse. Musha!" said Mr. O'Hara, putting his head out of the window, "if the blessed ould chair isn't stopping at me own door!"