“Dear, to be sure!” echoed Lydia, with frightful acrimony, “I could find it in my heart to pity that pore young gentleman myself. No one can ever say I wanted that there owdacious marriage.” (Which was certainly true. Lydia would infinitely have preferred to see her niece bloom unplucked on her maiden stem.) “Of all the unpleasant situations, I says, him to have a wife a milliner as is born to another class, and spend his days torn, so to speak, between the high and the low. He’ll never make a fine lady of Pamela, what’s a work-woman in the bone, and he can’t,” pursued Lydia, moved by her own eloquence almost to tears, “strip his own gentility off of himself like a coat and sit as it were in his shirt-sleeves, common, for the rest of his life.” Seeing angry retort leaping in her mistress’s eye, Lydia proceeded in a great hurry, to get out the next most disagreeable remark she could think of: “And as to him being the last of his name, your Ladyship can’t go counting on that. Mrs. Jocelyn Bellairs,” Lydia tittered, “will have a long family like her mother before her, and before we know where we are we’ll have little Bellairses a-running about all over the place like spiders----” She broke off. Intimately acquainted with her mistress as she was, there were sides to her character which Miss Lydia Pounce had as yet failed to grasp. She had thought to pay out my Lady for her odious unkindness, but her shaft had singularly missed the mark. All the ill-humour vanished from Kitty Kilcroney’s charming countenance. She clasped her hands with a genuine cry of delight. “Why, Lydia, I’ll be godmother to the first girl, I will indeed! It ought to be a charming creature, they so handsome and so happy! I’ll be godmother, and ’twill be a vast of pleasure to me, child, to think there’ll be another Kitty Bellairs!” THE END _Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons Ltd., London, Reading and Fakenham_ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.