How in the name of goodness was she to find such a sum? Did Pamela think she was made of gold? Here was a return for all her kindness! A girl who was so wickedly careless--likely to keep her promises, indeed! She that ought to be racking her brains to pay back her dear auntie for all her sacrifices. “Thirty pounds, miss, it cost me to send you to Paris, and you to be so unprincipled as to let Madame Eglantine’s husband take to ogling you. And it’s paying me back you ought to be, instead of having the brazenness to ask me for thirteen pounds. And indeed, miss, it’s not thirteen pounds I’ll give you; no, not a farthing more than the sum of the bill. You that might have had fourteen and tuppence!” She suddenly broke off, sat up straight, and pointed a finger at her niece with a sharp throw. “Where did you go to, miss, when you left this house? Straight, now! What? You went and sat under the trees in the park? Upon my word, I never! And how long might you have been a-sitting there? You don’t know. Better and better. You went to sleep, miss, with that there bag full of gold. Oh, you----” Pamela drooped her head, receiving the indictment as with the humility of a guilty conscience, though she was considerably relieved by the solution which the older Miss Pounce had found for herself. Suddenly Lydia bounced out of her seat. “Mercy on us, here’s my Lady!” cried she. And then, with a scream: “Mercy on us!” she cried again. “What in the world has happened?” Pamela stared. My Lady Kilcroney it was indeed, to judge by a fine feathered hat and a delicate flutter of muslins, but a vastly different Lady Kilcroney from the charming, happy little lady of Pamela’s remembrance. A small figure with a stricken face crawled into the room, and, as Lydia rushed forward, nearly swooned against her. “My Lady, my Lady, what is it?” cried the maid in genuine concern, guiding her mistress’s form to the chair she had herself but just vacated. “Oh, oh, oh!” moaned my Lady. “Oh, in the name of Heaven, send for my Lord? Oh, Lydia, the letter, the letter!” Both women then saw that in a little gloved hand my Lady Kilcroney was clutching an open sheet. Lydia took it into her own grasp and glanced at it. “Mercy on us!” then cried she for the third time. “That dratted young man you’ve been so good to! Well, if ever was anything so ungrateful! To go and put an end to himself, just to spite you! Never you take on, my Lady, he’s no great loss, I protest. A good riddance, say I.”