"We thank your lordship." Mrs. Esther bowed with dignity. This, surely, was a return to the Pimpernel Manner. "We have been living in seclusion, for reasons which need not be related, for some time. Therefore, Kitty has never been before to any public assembly. To be sure, I do not approve of bringing forward young girls too early; although, for my own part, I had already at her age been present at several entertainments of the most sumptuous and splendid character, not only at Bagnigge Wells and Cupid's Garden, but also at many great city feasts and banquets for the reception of illustrious personages, particularly in the year of grace, 1718, when my lamented father was Lord Mayor of London." The dear lady could never avoid introducing the fact that she was thus honourably connected. Lord Chudleigh, however, seemed interested. I learned, later, that some had been putting about, among other idle rumours, that I was the daughter of a tattered country curate. "Indeed," he said, "I knew not that the late Mr. Pleydell had been the Lord Mayor. It is a most distinguished position." "Not Mr. Pleydell, my lord. Sir Samuel Pimpernel, Knight, my father, was the Lord Mayor in question. His father was Lord Mayor before him. Kitty Pleydell is not my blood relation, but my niece and ward by adoption. Her father was a most distinguished Cambridge scholar and divine." "There are Pleydells," said Lord Chudleigh, "in Warwickshire. Perhaps----" "My father," I said, "was rector of a country parish in Kent, where Sir Robert Levett hath a large estate. He was the younger son of the Warwickshire family of that name, and died in the spring of last year. My relations of that county I have never met. Now, my lord, you have my genealogy complete." "It is an important thing to know," he said, laughing; "in a place like Epsom, where scandal is the staple of talk, as many freedoms are taken with a lady's family as with her reputation. I am glad to be provided with an answer to those who would enact the part of town-crier or backbiter, a character here greatly aspired to. No doubt the agreeable ladies whose tongues in the next world will surely be converted into two-edged swords, have already furnished Miss Kitty with highwaymen, tallow-chandlers, or attorneys for ancestors, and Wapping, Houndsditch, or the Rules of the Fleet"--it was lucky that Mrs. Esther had a fan--"for their place of residence. In the same way, they have most undoubtedly proved to each other that she has not a feature worth looking at, that her eyes squint--pray pardon me, Miss Kitty--her hair is red, her figure they would have the audacity to call crooked, and her voice they would maliciously say was cracked. It is the joy of these people to detract from merit. You can afford to be charitable, Miss Kitty. The enumeration of impossible disgraces and the distortion of the rarest charms afford these ladies some consolation for their envy and disappointment."