How grateful was Lady Selina! But “Oh, no, Ma’am,” she pleaded, “it makes me feel so horrid shy! There we were yesterday, my Lady Kilcroney and I, in one of the Queen’s barouches and every one turning round and staring at us, and oh! so disappointed, Ma’am, not to see the Royal faces. My mother is sending her own maid for me, and we’ll take a chaise and Sister Verney will meet me in the town.” Princess Augusta looked very kindly at the child. She liked her modest disclaimer and the little flattery it wrapped about, and it all sounded very proper and becoming. How could she guess that Selina was lying like a little devil, that the audacious creature would positively set out from the consecrated precincts of Queen’s Lodge alone, take the common coach to town and proceed on foot to Bond Street; in a kind of disguise indeed, a plain bonnet, borrowed off a Royal housemaid, which had a brown gauze veil to drop over her face, so that she might have passed her own mother in the street and not been known! The cunning girl watched her opportunity and slipped into Miss Pounce’s showroom at a slack moment. As she flung back her veil Pamela’s colour changed; she saw who it was. Selina walked quite close up to her and the two stood a moment staring at each other. The milliner was too acute not to feel the moment big with importance, and too shrewd not to guess at the cause. “What did you mean,” said Selina then, “by saying yesterday like that: ‘Sir Jasper! good God!’?” Pamela was not often taken-to, but she felt herself in a most disagreeable fix. “La!” she faltered. “I could have bitten my tongue out. I can only ask your pardon.” “I want you to answer my question. What did you mean?” Pamela, who had been growing pale, grew paler. “Father had trouble with him over a mortgage.” “Oh, tush with your mortgage! That’s only a bit of trumpery. It wasn’t the mortgage. You know something of Sir Jasper.” The milliner hesitated: then she tossed her head. “And if I do, my Lady? There! There ain’t anything for you to suspect me about, I do assure you.” “Oh, I don’t suspect you!” cried Selina wildly. “I see you hate him! I hate him myself! I haven’t anyone to help me. What do you know of him?” “Nothing that would count as against a gentleman’s honour,” said Pamela bitterly, recalling, with an inward shudder, the vile trick that had been played upon her, and the narrowness of her escape. Selina caught the working-woman’s two capable hands. “I won’t get you into a scandal! I know you’ve got your bread to earn. I’ll never mention your name or let anyone guess! I promise! I promise! Look here, I’ll put it differently: if you were me, would you marry Sir Jasper Standish?” Pamela drew a long breath and the truth leaped. “I’d see myself dead rather!” The absurdity of the phrase did not detract from its effectiveness. “Ah!” cried Selina. “Thank you! That’s all I wanted to know.”