IN WHICH MY LADY KILCRONEY INSISTS ON THE DUTY OF MORALITY.
“If you please, my Lady, might I speak to your Ladyship?”
My Lady Kilcroney looked up from the sorrows of Miss Clarissa Harlowe,
which she was particularly enjoying, and gazed at her handmaiden.
Lydia Pounce and her mistress had gone through, together, so many
emotions, intrigues, quarrels, reconciliations, triumphs, and despairs
that it was scarcely too much to say they had become indispensable
to each other. Therefore, too, both had grown to read each other’s
countenances with the utmost facility. Now, Lydia was pale and pinched;
her knobby little hands were clasping each other fiercely across her
neat waistband; she was visibly trembling. Lady Kilcroney knew these
symptoms.
“What is to do, Lydia?”
“Ho, my Lady!”
The Abigail here clutched at her heart and turned up her eyes.
“Dear me, Lydia,” said her Ladyship, tartly, “have they ventured to
laugh again in the pantry as you happened to be passing, or has anyone
broken into the safe and stolen my diamonds?”
“Ho, your Ladyship, you may well ask. Heaven knows I’m prepared from
this out to be the laughing-stock of this house. Everyone may point
the finger of scorn at me. The name of Pounce is for ever blasted! As
for thieves, my Lady, there are worse thieves than will ever be hanged
walking about this moment, and treasures stolen of value far above
diamonds!”
“Dear me!”
“Her Ladyship wouldn’t be so easy with her ‘dear me’s’ if she knew
what’s happened. ’Tis gospel truth, my Lady, and I’m telling no
falsehood, that the thought of having to inform your Ladyship is the
bitterest part of the sorrow that has come upon me this day!”
Kitty Kilcroney put down her book. Seeing that her maid’s eyes were
genuinely tear-stained, and that the convulsive shiverings were not all
assumed, she began to feel concern.
“Dear me!” she said again, in quite another tone. “I trust nothing has
happened to your family--your good brother, or any of the children?”
She broke off. Lydia, who was making the most dreadful grimaces, here
flung her little muslin apron over her head and sobbed behind it.
“It’ll break my brother’s heart, him so respected on his own property,
as old in the name as gentry, yeomen these hundreds of years, and only
for bad times none of them ever looking to service. And ho! my Lady,
him setting such store by that girl, and me so proud of her!”
“That girl! You don’t mean Pamela?”
Lydia dropped the apron.
“I do. The horrid, wicked creature. And ho, my Lady, it all comes of
encouraging idle young gentlemen and paying their debts for them, and
letting them off going to India, and if the name of Pounce is blasted,
the name of Bellairs ain’t much better, and so I tell you, fair and
square, my Lady!”
“Good heavens!” said my Lady Kilcroney, whisking round so sharply on
the sofa that Clarissa fell in one direction, and my Lady’s cushions,
fan, and pocket handkerchief in the other. “Never tell me that that
silly young man is--has been--can be----”
“He was, he is, and as to can be, your Ladyship knows yourself what
young gentlemen are! Oh, to think of its going on so long, though
indeed, I might ha’ known! Haven’t I seen them walking together on a
Sunday afternoon, times and again, and it’s all head toss and ‘How dare
you, aunt?’ if so much as a word of warning is given!”
“Jocelyn Bellairs! But what has been discovered? What proof have you?”
“Oh, la!” The fire of excitement was drying up the elder Miss Pounce’s
tears. “’Tis all over Mirabel’s already. Proof, my Lady? Wasn’t the
unfortunate girl seen sitting in a garden last Sunday in a secret
cottage, with a dark baby on her lap? _A dark baby, my Lady!_ And think
of Mr. Bellairs, as black as my shoe! And her, as Miss Smithson--that’s
the book-keeper, my Lady--who has just left me, said to me, as bold as
brass, all in the sunshine. And she ain’t denied nothing, neither.”
“Who? Pamela?”
Kitty was falling from amazement to amazement. She had seen a vast
deal, one way and another, of Madame Mirabel’s milliner, and if ever
there was, in her opinion, an honest, sensible, good-living young
woman, it was Pamela Pounce.
“She don’t deny it. Miss Popple up and taxed her straight out, and she
as good as admitted it. Not a bit ashamed, either.”
“Foh!” my Lady fumed. “Surely you’re not going to condemn your own
flesh and blood on hearsay, woman?”
“My Lady,” Lydia began to pant, as if she suddenly remembered how hard
she had been running. “I’m back from Madame Mirabel’s this moment, and
seen Pamela, and oh, the audacity of her! Laughing in my face, and
tossing her head! ‘And ’tis true,’ cries she, ‘the little rogue is
dark. And if I prefer ’em dark,’ says she, ‘what then?’”
“‘Ho, Miss,’ says I, ‘your taste lies in the dark line,’ says I.
‘That’s no surprise to me you bold hussy!’ And then, my Lady, you’ll
never believe it, she regular insulted me.
“‘Well,’ she says, ‘and if I do prefer a dark gentleman, ain’t a body
free to have their fancy? There’s you,’ she says, ‘as likes them fat
and cat-footed, with a wheeze and a paunch,’ referring, my Lady, to the
attentions Mr. Blandfoot is paying me. And then I answers her back:
“‘I’m sure, you wicked girl, if Mr. Blandfoot and I ever agree to
settle, it’ll be as man and wife, respectable _and_ respected.’”
“‘Why, lud, aunt,’ she says, ‘you have a nasty mind.’ And more than
that, my Lady, I couldn’t get out of her, it being her busy time.
And--oh, dear, to be sure!--was there ever such a desperate bit of
work? Her getting on so well, fought over by the ladies, I may say!”
Lady Kilcroney allowed the lamentations to continue without
interruption for some time, her own thoughts being concentrated on the
painful problem. The more she reflected upon it, the more, alas! she
began to believe in the story.
Old Bellairs’s nephew was a sad dog--a handsome, plausible, dashing,
insidious rascal--she knew that. And that he had pursued Pamela with
his attentions, she was also aware. The girl’s attitude of defiance
could hardly go with innocence, and there was that strange story about
the debt. Now, Kitty liked Pamela, and she had a certain sympathy, too,
with a spirit that refused to humiliate itself on a question of private
conduct.
“I trust no one has ever been able to say of me that I am otherwise
than strictly virtuous,” she thought, “but I can’t abide these prying
prudes that think ’tis their business to show up any poor child that’s
made a slip in her time.”
“And, ho, my Lady,” concluded Lydia, “they’ve kept it from Madame
Mirabel, on condition that my niece resigns her situation.”
“Now, look here, Lydia, stop sniffing. If ’tis my poor dear Bellairs’s
nephew that wronged the girl, I’ll see that he makes reparation. He
shall marry her. Leave it to me. Leave it to me, I say! I’ll have the
truth out of them both, and then I’ll join their hands, I swear it,
before I’m two days older!”
Kitty was one of those whose plans are swiftly conceived and whose
impatient spirit will not brook an instant’s delay in their execution.
She sat down that very moment to write to her graceless relative.
“He must not guess,” she thought, as her quill ran with little squeaks
and pauses--“he must not guess that he is to be brought to book, or
my young gentleman will have a thousand good reasons for declining to
present himself.”
“_Dear Nephew Jocelyn_,” wrote she, very silkily--“_Pray come and
visit me this next Thursday afternoon at three of the clock. It is a
long time since we have met, and there is a little matter----_”
Here Kitty stopped and nibbled at her pen. How could she bait the trap
so that the fox should fall into it?
“_a little matter which I wish to discuss with you. I think when you
hear what it is, you will agree ’twas worth wasting half an hour on
your attached aunt-in-law_,
“KITTY KILCRONEY.”
Kitty shook the pounce-box over the sheet, folded, superscribed, and
affixed with a pat a knowing little wafer which bore the semblance of a
rose with the touching motto: “Sweet unto death.”
Then, popping her round chin on her clasped hands, she gave herself to
reflection, quite a minute’s reflection.
“If you want a thing well done, do it yourself. There never was a
sounder saw. I’ll not trust Lydia.”
My Lady took up her pen again.
“_My good Pounce_”--thus ran the quill--“_Pray present yourself here
on Thursday at three o’clock, bringing the dark baby about which
there’s such a to-do. I think I have proved myself a friend to you;
do you prove that you recognise it by falling in with my desire._
“K. KILCRONEY.
“_P.S.--I was never more anxious to act well by you than in this
instance._”
Having despatched these missives, my Lady kept her counsel; and when
the answers came--Mr. Bellairs’s reply accepting rather effusively,
with indeed, as his benefactress felt, not without some malice, a
lively sense of favours to come; and Pamela’s in four respectful lines
couched in the best millinery phraseology--the plotter locked them into
her bureau, and forbade Lydia to mention the subject to her again, if
she valued her situation.
On the Thursday afternoon fixed for the meeting my Lady Kilcroney
thoroughly prepared to enjoy herself. There was nothing she more
relished than the ruling of a difficult situation. She had no qualms as
to the extent of her genius; she had no inconvenient scruples as to her
wisdom.
The nephew of her late poor Bellairs had, it seemed, wronged the young
person in whom she took an interest. He should be made to right that
wrong, or her name was not Kitty Kilcroney.
When the hour approached she clothed herself in garments subtly adapted
to her role, rich in texture, yet grave in hue; a mulberry satin, to be
precise, brocaded with amber roses. Her toilet accomplished, she flung
a satisfied look into her mirror. ’Twas a bit heavy for a summer’s day,
but really, with the old deep-hued lace at throat and elbows, mightily
becoming.
Then she wheeled upon her maid.
“Now, Lydia,” ordered she, “you are not to show your nose till I bid
you. I’ll not have you poking it into my arrangements. It’s a deal too
sharp and fond of prying, as it is. Ay, I do expect your niece and Mr.
Jocelyn Bellairs. And, no, I haven’t told you anything about it. I’m
to manage this business or I wash my hands of it. If you goggle your
eyes any more, Lydia, they will drop out! Nay, I will not permit you a
word with Pamela. Nay, not so much as a look at her. You will keep to
your premises till I ring my bell.”
Lydia tossed her head a good deal, and was sure she was very grateful
to her Ladyship. And no one could accuse her of wanting to interfere,
Heaven knew! And, as for looking at that creature’s bold face again
till she was an honest woman, it was enough for her the last time.
Heaven was her witness that she’d had a queasiness at the pit of the
stomach ever since!
Having issued her instructions, Kitty sailed downstairs, turned the
astonished Kilcroney out of his library, which had, she considered, a
more judicial appearance than the gold-and-white drawing-room, ordered
my Lord, in the determined tone which he never resisted, to his club
till dinner-time; rang for a couple of footmen to remove my Lord’s
tankard, pipe and other witnesses of loose living from the premises,
and sat herself down in a large leather arm-chair to await the sinners.
Three had not yet struck from the grandfather clock in the corner when
Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs was announced. He entered with rather less of
the conquering air than was his wont. No doubt a very handsome youth,
and vastly improved in manners, thought Kitty, noting the exact depth
of his bow and the decorous air of homage with which he kissed her
extended hand. Attired, too, with a quiet elegance, which, considering
that the hand he saluted was the one which had frequently paid his
tailor, was, my Lady considered, well chosen.
“Pray sit down, Nephew Jocelyn. I am glad to see you.”
When she had resumed her position in the seat of justice, and he had
deferentially placed himself in a high-backed chair--a little too near
her, she thought, for proper respect, but some slight familiarity might
be pardoned to a relative--he looked at her interrogatively, and there
ensued a silence.
It was not Kitty’s policy to put him at his ease by small talk; rather,
indeed, through a certain measured severity, to awaken stirs of
conscience. And as now his fine brown orbs took the inward roll which
she knew betokened self-searching, she kept an immovable countenance,
looking down at her brocade lap and smoothing a fold here and there
with delicate, be-ringed fingers. She had considerable knowledge of the
world, this spoilt, pretty child of fortune!
“I’ll wager,” thought she, “he’s counting up his debts, and wondering
which I’ve heard of, and never giving a thought to his horrid
immorality.”
Mr. Bellairs cleared his throat, glanced uneasily at his hostess, began
a sentence on the subject of the weather, broke off in the middle and
said, with a plunge:
“Here I am, then, Aunt Kilcroney, agreeable to your command!”
“And, indeed, ’tis no less than your duty, I should think. ’Tis a vast
of time, sir, since you have done me the honour to call upon me. Yet I
think each quarter day brings you the wherewithal to remember me by, to
say the least of it.”
He looked at her with an expression in which relief and disappointment
struggled. Was it only to keep him to heel, like a well-trained dog,
that she had sent for him? Was there nothing but huffiness at his lack
of assiduity to account for her air of disapproval, or had she heard
of that little bill to which my Lord Kilcroney had so good-naturedly
set his name? Or of that ruffling night at the Cocoa Tree when he had
lost four hundred pounds to my Lord Sanquhar, and thereafter raised the
money to settle it with Mr. Aaron, on my lady’s own banker’s order to
himself? A transaction which might have been ruin indeed if the most
generous girl in all the world had not got him out of the sponging
house in time. Here his cogitations came to an abrupt end, and the very
person in his thoughts stood in the doorway.
He got up, all amazement, as my lady too, majestically rose. What in
the name of Heaven brought Pamela Pounce hither, and why, by all that
was crazy, was she carrying a little dark child in her arms?
The young man flushed, bit his lip, and trembled with a sudden fury.
By Heaven, if Pamela had gone behind his back to tattle to my Lady, he
would--yes, dash it, he would pay her back and never speak to the chit
again!
“Is this the child?” said Kitty, with a bell-like tone of melancholy.
Pamela curtsied with great deliberation for all reply, and, at a wave
of Kitty’s hand, gracefully sat down, settling her pretty burthen in
her lap.
It was a little girl, beautiful in a dark way, with devouring brown
eyes. She was exquisitely dressed in a lawn frock, with insertion and
mignonette trimming. The Princess Amelia could not have been finer
clad, thought Kitty, and as Pamela took off the straw hat with the
ostrich feathers and revealed an ordered tangle of copper curls, which
would one day be night-black, threaded through with a faint blue
ribbon, my lady could hardly restrain a cry of admiration.
Kitty stood and looked at Mr. Bellairs. He was in the throes of
undeniable agitation. She looked at Pamela, serene and, as she gazed
down at the child, Kitty thought, lovely, with a maternal softening of
her bright, handsome face.
“Ah, Jocelyn Bellairs!” cried Lady Kilcroney, dramatically, “you may
well turn away. You may well feel that sight were more than you can
endure. But raise your eyes, sir. Behold, behold, and let your heart
speak. Can you call yourself a man and refuse that trusting creature
her rights, refuse that exquisite cherub a father’s name?”
“Good Lord!” cried Jocelyn. He cast the hat he had been clasping under
his arm into the middle of the room, the better to clutch his temples.
“Am I stark, staring mad? What monstrous stroke is this, what plot,
what inconceivable mistake?”
There was such a ring of truth in his accents that my Lady shot a
doubting glance at Pamela, but conviction returned upon her as she saw
this young woman bending over the child so as to hide her face, and
shaken with hysterical emotion.
Kitty drew a long breath, and started again.
“Do not think, nephew, that by adding deceit to your vileness, you can
make a better situation for yourself. Far from it. I have not sent for
you here to-day to rebuke or even to reproach. My sole desire is to
help you both. Heaven forbid that I should be hard on any woman who has
been betrayed by her own heart!
“Pamela, if you had confided in me ere this--nay, never mind now!
Suffice it that I know all. As for you, sir, I am well aware that
gentlemen think all too lightly of a woman’s virtue; that if their
fancy leads them to court in a lower class than their own, the most
hitherto virtuous and confiding female becomes, to use their own horrid
words, fair game.
“But I’ll not have Pamela Pounce treated so! She’s far too good for
you, sir, and so I tell you straight. And the proposal which I am about
to make to you is for her sake, and not for yours. You shall marry this
good young woman--good but for you, you scamp!--and I shall make it my
business to place you in an advantageous position out of England. I’ll
pay your debts again, sir, and set you up. I have not thought where
yet, but it shall not be India, for the little angel’s sake----”
Here she stopped suddenly. Her eye strayed to the child, and she saw,
to her utter amazement, that the young milliner was laughing, not
weeping.
“Pamela Pounce!” she cried, in a scandalized voice.
Pamela got up and set the child on the floor.
“Will your Ladyship observe the little one? She is small for her age,
I know, nevertheless it is plain to see she is over two years. How old
are you, Carmelita? Tell the lady.”
The child, who had maintained a solemn observant silence during the
whole proceeding, her great eyes roaming from one person to another,
while she contentedly sat on Pamela’s lap, now looked up into her
friend’s face with a roguish smile.
“Tell the pretty lady.”
“Tell you,” said the child.
“Well, then, tell Pamela.”
But with the perversity of its sex and years, the child was here seized
with overwhelming giggles and buried its head in Pamela’s skirt.
Kitty was staring with her mouth and eyes open, while a dawning sense
of something utterly ludicrous and amazing showed itself on her face.
“If her Ladyship will kindly tax her memory,” Pamela spoke in
ineradicable bonnet-shop phraseology--“to the extent of recollecting
that I met Mr. Bellairs for the first time on the doorstep of this
house but eighteen months ago, she will realise that----”
“Enough! Enough!” cried Kitty.
She waved her hand, fell back into her arm-chair, pressing her filmy
handkerchief to her lips, trying to check her peals of laughter.
Perhaps she was not quite so overwhelmed with merriment as she
pretended. Perhaps she felt that the only way of mitigating the supreme
ridicule of her situation was by being the first to laugh at it.
As her patroness laughed, Pamela waxed serious, while Jocelyn Bellairs
stood scarlet and indignant, the picture of offence and injured
rectitude.
“I little thought, my Lady, when those cats at Mirabel’s got hold of
my cat of an aunt--begging your Ladyship’s pardon--and started this
scandal against me, and all along of seeing my pink flounces at tea
with old Madame Guturez, this darling’s grandmother, I little thought
your Ladyship would be ready to believe such an outrageous bit of
spiteful nonsense.
“When they upped and attacked me, says I to them, ‘Mind your own
business!’ Heaven be good to me,” said Pamela. “I wasn’t going to
stoop to defend myself to them, and if I hadn’t been the best-natured
girl in the world, I’d have gone straight to Madam Mirabel, and told
her then and there of their plot!
“And as for Aunt Lydia--well, her ladyship knows herself. Those old
maids have the minds of I don’t know what. It’s enough to be young and
good-looking for them to think the worst of you. And her a-drawing in
Mr. Bellairs so shameful. I don’t mind confessing to you, my Lady, that
the more that poor old thing shook and shivered, and went on at me, the
more I thought it would be a fine joke to let her give herself away.
But when it comes to your Ladyship----”
“Well, well,” said Kitty, not quite liking the tirade, with pansy eyes
rather angry over tightly smiling lips. “You had but to write me three
words of explanation, Pamela----”
“Begging your Ladyship’s pardon, if I’d explained ever so, your
Ladyship wouldn’t have believed. No lady would ever believe a poor
girl accused like me, if she didn’t bring up proof. And allow me to
point out, your Ladyship,” went on the milliner, with a flourish, as
if she were indicating some remarkable feather or trimming, “that
your Ladyship having merely wrote me to come round with the child, it
wouldn’t have been becoming in me to be attributing meanings to your
Ladyship’s commands.”
The fire went out of Kitty’s eyes, for she was a just woman; she
laughed again, and this time with a genuine ring.
“Why, was there ever such a girl! And I so moved over your story, and
so yearning over the child, and so stirred up, ready to threaten and
appeal. And so pleased with myself to be standing such a friend to you,
and bringing Master Jocelyn to book so clever!”
“Nay,” said Pamela, “she’s not mine at all.” Here she swung the little
creature up into her arms, and hugged her. “And I’m sure I wish she
was. There, I don’t know what I wouldn’t have gone through to have
such a little darling as this all my own! No, she’s not mine, your
Ladyship. Poor innocent. Ah, ’tis cruel! It’s worse than no mother at
all she has, her that’s the child of the wretch that calls herself Lady
Sanquhar.”
Both Kitty and her nephew-by-law cried out at this; Master Jocelyn was
shaken from his injured mood by sudden memories.
“What, that odious, bold-faced, dressed-up strumpet!” exclaimed Kitty,
“driving about in the park in his Lordship’s curricle, and brazening it
at the Opera, till a woman of virtue scarce knows which way to look!”
and:
“The Spanish woman that ran away with Lord Sanquhar!” shouted Mr.
Bellairs, “whose husband was shot before my very eyes as he was trying
to stop her? Aye, aye, I remember there was a little child.”
“And only three days ago,” said Pamela, “I turned the woman out of the
shop. ’Tis transported she’d be, if justice were done.”
At this my Lady Kilcroney stepped across the room and embraced Miss
Pamela Pounce. Then she kissed the child, too, with lingering, repeated
caress, that round velvet cheek stirring irresistible motherly passions.
“And it shall have a cake, it shall, and nice chockey to drink, it
shall, the pretty rogue! Ring the bell, Jocelyn.”
Having obeyed, Mr. Bellairs advanced, nostrils dilated, swaggering a
little as he came, with a defiant smartness which did not sit ill on
him.
“I presume, Aunt Kilcroney, that as there is nothing else upon which
you can desire to confer with me, you would wish me to withdraw.
Nevertheless, there is one word I should like to say in your hearing to
Miss Pamela Pounce. Will you spare me a hand, Pamela. Thank you. I kiss
this honest hand, this honest, kindly, helpful hand, and I say that if
you will condescend to bestow it on me, I will----”
But Pamela drew away her fingers, and curtsying, child and all, said
with great dignity:
“Thank you, Mr. Bellairs, I have no intention of changing my state.”
Kitty looked doubtfully from one to the other. Had he been in earnest?
She saw that Pamela did not think so, for the girl had coloured to the
roots of her hair, and tossed her head. She would have no gentleman’s
pity or condescension.
The countenance of the young man was inscrutable, as he bowed very low,
turned on his heel, and left the room.
* * * * *
It was past nine that evening before Madame Mirabel’s head milliner
had sufficiently made up her afternoon’s holiday to be able to leave
the workroom. There was a purple twilight over the whole busy town,
and the lamplighter was going round with his ladder, leaving a jonquil
flame behind him at long intervals. Here and there a torch flared in
a link. The streets were full of the sound of feet, the quick feet of
those hurrying home, the slow feet of the strollers. Pamela was tired;
the day had been a long and agitating one. She paused a moment on the
pavement, outside the shop, to inhale the warm air, and to enjoy the
sense of leisure, at last. Her mind worked mechanically.
“A twist of purple net on dark blue satin, with a tuft of orange
feathers. ’Twould be a new combination and vastly genteel. (’Twould
suit my Lady Kilcroney too, with her pansy eyes.)”
Some one came up behind her with a quick tread that suddenly faltered.
Then a voice called her:
“Pamela!”
“La, Mr. Bellairs, what a start you give me!”
“May I go a little way with you, Pamela dear?”
“There now! If that isn’t a gentleman all over, and me having only just
re-established my character! A-waiting for me again outside Madame
Mirabel’s, with goodness gracious knows how many cats’ eyes a-spying on
me from behind the shutters!”
Something about the girl’s gay courage, her sane, bright outlook on
life, touched him at a spot already exceedingly vulnerable. Anyone
else, he thought, would be having the vapours over this afternoon’s
work; reproaching, weeping, lost in self-pity and recrimination. He
reflected, too, how it might have been, had she listened to him one
winter’s evening, and one summer’s day. A girl in a thousand! His mind
had been already made up, but he ratified the inner decision with an
ardent leap of the heart.
They went on side by side, till they reached the Park, and then she
remembered again, how, a few yards away, nearly two years ago, she had
snatched a pistol from him. He stopped her, and spoke.
“Pamela, I asked you to give me your hand to-day. I ask you again to be
my wife. Oh, when I saw you stand with the little dark child in your
arms, which they thought was ours, I vowed you were the one woman in
the world for me! Oh, I have been a base wretch! I owe you money, I owe
you my honour. I owe you my life. I owe you something more worth than
all these; the only real, the only pure love I have ever known. Pamela!
You’ll make a man of me yet, if you’ll have me.”
She had once been shaken, flattered by his attentions; had looked up
at him as a being, splendid, dashing, gallant, altogether out of her
sphere. When he had courted her, it was as if a god had stooped. But
this evening he was something quite different to her: a weak, wild
youth whom her love might steady; a spendthrift, a gambler, an amiable
prodigal for whom she might prepare the fatted calf, whom her ring
might bind to home; one, in fine, who had need of her. It was the
mother in her who smiled on him now with wet eyes.
Under a high moon, and a sky full of stars they presently discussed
plans that seemed to Pamela to combine the bliss of Eden with the
practicality of a work-a-day world.
“I’ll not give up my business, sir! I’ll never pretend to be other than
I am. No false lady airs for me!”
“You wouldn’t be Pamela if there were. You shall do exactly what you
like! But I’m going to work too. Indeed, my dearest girl, I will! And
we’ll have that cottage somewhere in the green, not too far but what
you can get the coach of a morning.”
“Oh,” cried Pamela, clasping her hands and laughing. “I’ll have roses
in the garden, and sit out of a Sunday in a pink muslin dress with
flounces!”