“You need not repeat his raving to me,” cried my Lady Kilcroney decidedly. “Dry your eyes now, and hasten to your duty. Sir Jasper in his present mood may very well not come to the ball, but he shall render an account of his folly in this very room to-morrow morning, and if the marriage does not take place from my house next Monday as arranged, I am a Dutchwoman, as complete a Dutchwoman as Mrs. Schwellenberg. I can say no more. And I trust,” said Kitty, soliloquising as the door slammed on the Maid-of-Honour’s exit, “and I trust you will pay Sir Jasper back for this evening’s work in good ringing coin, child, once you’re Lady Selina Standish. As I have no doubt you will, my love--cold-hearted, capricious?--aye, he’s not so far out there--and fiery tempered to boot! It will give me a vast of pleasure to see such a buck as he proper punished and tamed!” She herself began the process with considerable conscientiousness next morning in that interview which Sir Jasper was ready enough to grant. My Lady was tired; for to be in attendance on Royalty was to make of a ball more of a fatigue than a diversion. She was anxious, too; for the Queen had heard that it was Lady Selina’s visit to Lady Kilcroney which had resulted in the Princess Augusta actually being kept waiting; and had shown displeasure at so extraordinary a breach of etiquette. Kitty had no explanation to offer. She would have died rather than hint at the threatening scandal. So considerable peevishness had accumulated to fall upon the devoted head of Sir Jasper. But at first that individual was beyond feeling anything save his own anguish. He roared like a wounded bull; hit his brow till the powder flew; thumped his chest till his vocal chords reverberated; paced the room, declaiming in one breath that he was infamously betrayed, and in the next that ’twas a just retribution for perjury to the best of wives. He swore that his heart was broken; never had he loved, never could he love woman as he loved the false, intriguing Selina. Then he declared that the organ in question had never been mended, but lay in fragments under the tombstone sacred to Julia. It was only when his passion had expended itself in exhaustion that my Lady was able to make herself heard. Then she dissected the value of the evidence upon which he proposed to take so outrageous a step. She exposed the folly of his jealousy, she mocked the absurdity of the figure he cut.