Again she laughed that almost mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment before.

"You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she continued.

"Why, can't you guess?
Mr.Crozier talked of her always as though she was--well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying, 'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy knees!' Why, I expected to see a sort of great--goodness--gracious goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her.

Bless you, he never opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once or twice hard--like that, when he mentioned her!" She breathed in such mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.
"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she--that little sprite--wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible says.

It--" "What do you know of the inside of that letter ?" asked her mother, staring.
"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done, and what the nature of the letter was.
"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it--I've worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.
"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness interfering with other people's affairs--of that kind.