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.