“_I am sorry to treat my fat, good-natured Royal so. She was a kind piece. But ’tis a vile life._” “And oh, oh, ’tis she is a vile piece! Simpson! Let her be Simpson to the end and die an old woman!” Kitty was more outraged, more incensed, more profoundly disturbed than she had ever known herself. Why, indeed, had she meddled with match-making, and who would be looked on coldly over such scandal at Court, but she? all innocence, kind heart and good nature! She had half a mind to send in her resignation and have done with it. As for Sir Jasper, he was well served, for an odious, bullying, stupid fellow, who couldn’t make himself agreeable when he had the chance of his life! _She_ put herself out any more for him? _She_ expose herself to the unpleasantness of breaking the news to him? Not Kitty, not my Lady Kilcroney. The little woman made up her mind in a minute. She would go out of town. It was fine April weather. Bath would be at its best. She preferred it out of the season. She would pass on the jilt’s letter to Sir Jasper. Lydia should call a hackney coach and go round with it and the jewels at once. “And I shall add a line,” thought Kitty, “that will prevent him from coming to seek sympathy from me!” “_When you have perused the letter of Lady Selina, by this time Simpson, dear Sir Jasper_,” she wrote, “_perhaps you will feel as I do, that what has plucked you apart has not been either your indelicate behaviour or the young lady’s capriciousness, but the hand of your sainted Julia_.” It was fortunate that there was no one in the room to hear the awful words that escaped Sir Jasper’s lips when he came to this. What fell from them was the blasphemy: “Damn Julia!” CHAPTER VIII IN WHICH A WONDERFUL BIT OF LUCK COMES OUT OF MISS POUNCE’S BANDBOX FOR SOMEBODY ELSE Miss Pamela Pounce, having inadvertently marred a most desirable alliance and incidentally assisted a mad elopement, told herself that it was a sad, tiresome world in which love brought trouble to high and low, and that the best thing a woman of intelligence could do, was to put such stuff out of her head and be grateful that she could work. “Dear, to be sure,” Pamela wondered, “how did people get along at all who hadn’t some honest occupation to keep their silly minds off themselves?” ’Twas only to be expected that she should have such fretful faces to suit with heads and hats; disappointed mothers coming to complain that Miss’s toque was the wrong shade of blue, passionate damsels vowing that the very sight of a pink rosette made them sick. Pamela could read “as if it was wrote in print,” as she said herself, the fluctuations of many an _amourette_, many a well-laid matrimonial scheme. Where her art might help she was ready with the most obliging disinterestedness; when failure had followed on her best efforts she took the despite of her disappointed clients with the utmost philosophy.