“Talks, bless you, Kitty! why, that parrot hasn’t said a word this ten year.  He used to say Poor Poll! when we first had him, but he found it was easier to squawk, and that’s all he ever does nowadays,—­except bite once in a while.”

“Well, an’ to be sure,” Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her defeats, “if you’ll kape a cat that does n’t know a mouse when she sees it, an’ a dog that only barks for his livin’, and a part that only squawks an’ bites an’ niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-hearted woman that’s alive, an’ bliss ye, if ye was only a good Catholic, the Holy Father ’d make a saint of ye in less than no time!”

So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite of her three successive discomfitures.

“You may come up now, Kitty,” said Mr. Gridley over the stairs.  He had just finished and sealed a letter.

“Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars?  And how does our young lady seem to be of late?”

“Whisht! whisht! your honor.”

Mr. Bradshaw’s lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive listener.  She opened every door in the room, “by your lave,” as she said.  She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear.  Then she went, in her excess of caution, to the window.  She saw nothing noteworthy except Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in the distance.  The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment, he leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening, apparently, in the pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by Carlo Dolce Scheffer.

Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr. Gridley, who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a catch at her apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that she had left that part of her costume at home.—­Automatic movements, curious.

Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for herself as the reporter of the occasion.  She then repeated to him, in her own way, that part of the conversation which has been already laid before the reader.  There is no need of going over the whole of this again in Kitty’s version, but we may fit what followed into the joints of what has been already told.

“He cahled her Cynthy, d’ ye see, Mr. Gridley, an’ tahked to her jist as asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he did.  An’ so, says he, I’m goin’ away, says he, an’ I’m goin’ to be gahn siveral days, or perhaps longer, says he, an’ you’d better kape it, says he.”

“Keep what, Kitty?  What was it he wanted her to keep?” said Mr. Gridley, who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot, and meant to follow it.  He was getting impatient with the “says he’s” with which Kitty double-leaded her discourse.