This letter, instead of conciliating Miss Pepper, threw her into a greater rage than ever. This might have been owing in part to the fact that she was suffering from an attack of neuralgia, induced by a cold taken the day she went to Canandaigua in Edna’s behalf. Neuralgia is not pleasant to bear at any time, and Miss Pepper did not bear it pleasantly, and looked more like a scarecrow than a human being as she crouched before the fire, with her false teeth out, a hasty pudding poultice on her face, a mustard paste on the back of her neck, and an old woollen shawl pinned over her head to keep it warm. “Mrs. Churchill! Mrs. Fiddlesticks! That chit of a child,” she said, when she finished reading Jack Heyford’s letter, “sends her love, and is sorry, and hopes I’ll forgive her! Stuff! I hope I won’t! Brought up religiously as she was, confirmed and all that, and then ran away with a beggar who breaks his neck. No, I shan’t forgive her; leastwise not for a spell. She ought to suffer awhile, and she needn’t think to wheedle me into asking her home right away. By and by, when she is punished enough, I may take her back, but not now. She has made her bed and must lie in it.” This was Miss Pepper’s decision, and taking advantage of a few minutes when her face was easier, she commenced a letter to Edna, berating her soundly for what she had done, telling her she could not expect her friends to stand by her when she disgraced herself by “marrying a man or boy who did not own so much as the shirt on his back, and who was mean enough to buy a lot of jewelry and never pay for it. Greenough told me about the watch, and coral, and ring, and he’s going to send the bill to Mr. Leighton. I should think you’d feel smart wearing the jimcracks. Yes, I should.”