"He-him! He's by himself, with something of every sort in him from the top to the bottom. There's been a ditcher in his family, and there may have been a duke. But Shiel Crozier—Shiel"—she flushed as she said the name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too— "he is all of one kind. He's not a blend. And he's married to her in there!"
"You needn't speak in that tone about her. She's as fine as can be."
"She's as fine as a bee," retorted Kitty. Again she laughed that almost mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment before. "You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she continued. "Why, can't you guess? Mr. Crozier talked of her always as though she was—well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying, 'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy knees!' Why, I expected to see a sort of great—goodness—gracious goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her. Bless you, he never opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once or twice hard—like that, when he mentioned her!" She breathed in such mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.
"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she —that little sprite—wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible says. It—"
"What do you know of the inside of that letter?" asked her mother, staring.
"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done, and what the nature of the letter was.
"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it—I've worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.
"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness interfering with other people's affairs—of that kind. It never was any use."
"This will be the exception to the rule," returned Kitty. "There she is"—again she flicked a hand towards the other room—"after they've been parted five years. Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and after I'd read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put it all to her. I've got intuition—that's Celtic and mad," she added, with her chin thrusting out at her mother, to whom the Irish that her husband had been, which was so deep in her daughter, was ever a mystery to her, and of which she was more or less afraid.
"I've got a plan, and I believe—I know—it will work," Kitty continued. "I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to deal with the problem, and then you'll see! But all this fuss for a little tiny button of a thing like that in there—pshaw! Mr. Crozier is worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens. How he used to tell that story of the Rhinegold—do you remember? Wasn't it grand? Well, I am glad now that he's going—yes, whatever trouble there may be, still he is going. I feel it in my heart."