Norry the Boat toiled up the back stairs with wrath in her heart. She had been listening for some minutes with grim enjoyment to cries from the landing upstairs; unavailing calls for Louisa, interspersed with the dumb galvanic quiver of a bell-less bellwire, and at last Francie’s voice at the angle half-way down the kitchen stairs had entreated her to find and despatch to her the missing Protestant orphan. Then Norry had said to herself, while she lifted the pot of potatoes off the fire, “Throuble-the-house! God knows I’m heart-scalded with the whole o’ yees!” And then aloud, “She’s afther goin’ out to the dhryin’ ground to throw out a few aper’rns to blaych.”

“Well, I must have somebody; I can’t get my habit on,” the voice had wailed in reply. “Couldn’t you come, Norry?”

As we have said, Norry ascended the stairs with wrath in her heart, as gruesome a lady’s-maid as could well be imagined, with an apron mottled with grease spots, and a stale smell of raw onions pervading her generally. Francie was standing in front of the dim looking-glass with which Charlotte chastened the vanity of her guests, trying with stiff and tired fingers to drag the buttons of a brand new habit through the unyielding buttonholes that tailors alone have the gift of making, and Norry’s anger was forgotten in prayerful horror, as her eyes wandered from the hard felt hat to the trousered ankle that appeared beneath the skimpy and angular skirt.

“The Lord look down in pity on thim that cut that petticoat!” she said. “Sure, it’s not out in the sthreets ye’re goin’ in the like o’ that! God knows it’d be as good for ye to be dhressed like a man altogether!”

“I wouldn’t care what I was dressed like if I could only make the beastly thing meet,” said Francie, her face flushed with heat and effort; “wasn’t I the fool to tell him to make it tight in the waist!”

The subsequent proceedings were strenuous, but in the end successful, and finally Miss Fitzpatrick walked stiffly downstairs, looking very slender and tall, with the tail of the dark green habit—she had felt green to be the colour consecrated to sport—drawn tightly round her, and a silver horse-shoe brooch at her throat.

Charlotte was standing at the open hall door talking to Mr. Lambert.

“Come along, child,” she said genially, “you’ve been so long adorning yourself that nothing but his natural respect for the presence of a lady kept this gentleman from indulging in abusive language.”

Charlotte, in her lighter moods, was addicted to a ponderous persiflage, the aristocratic foster-sister of her broader peasant jestings in the manner of those whom she was fond of describing as “the bar purple.”

Mr. Lambert did not trouble himself to reply to this sally. He was looking at the figure in the olive-green habit that was advancing along the path of sunlight to the doorway, and thinking that he had done well to write that letter on the subject of the riding that Francie might expect to have at Lismoyle. Charlotte turned her head also to look at the radiant, sunlit figure.

“Why, child, were you calling Norry just now to melt you down and pour you into that garment? I never saw such a waist! Take care and don’t let her fall off, Roddy, or she’ll snap in two!” She laughed loudly and discordantly, looking to Mr. Lambert’s groom for the appreciation that was lacking in the face of his master; and during the arduous process of getting Miss Fitzpatrick into her saddle she remained on the steps, offering facetious suggestions and warnings, with her short arms akimbo, and a smile that was meant to be jovial accentuating the hard lines of her face.

At last the green habit was adjusted, the reins placed properly between Francie’s awkward fingers, and Mr. Lambert had mounted his long-legged young chestnut and was ready to start.

“Don’t forget Lucy expects you to tea, Charlotte,” he said as he settled himself in his saddle.

“And don’t you forget what I told you,” replied Charlotte, sinking her voice confidentially; “don’t mind her if she opens her mouth wide; it’ll take less to shut it than ye’d think.”

Lambert nodded and rode after Francie, who, in compliance with the wishes of the black mare, had hurried on towards the gate. The black mare was a lady of character, well-mannered but firm, and the mere sit of the saddle on her back told her that this was a case when it would be well to take matters into her own control; she accordingly dragged as much of the reins as she required from Francie’s helpless hands, and by the time she had got on to the high road, had given her rider to understand that her position was that of tenant at will.

They turned their backs on the town, and rode along the dazzling, dusty road, that radiated all the heat of a blazing afternoon.

“I think he did you pretty well with that habit,” remarked Lambert presently. “What’s the damage to be?”

“What do you think?” replied Francie gaily, answering one question with another after the manner of her country.

“Ten?”

“Ah, go on! Where’d I get ten pounds? He said he’d only charge me six because you recommended me, but I can tell him he’ll have to wait for his money.”

“Why, are you hard up again?”

Francie looked up at him and laughed with unconcern that was not in the least affected.

“Of course I am! Did you ever know me that I wasn’t?”

Lambert was silent for a moment or two, and half unconsciously his thoughts ran back over the time, six years ago now, when he had first met Francie. There had always been something exasperating to him in her brilliant indifference to the serious things of life. Her high spirits were as impenetrable as a coat of mail; her ignorance of the world was at once sublime and enraging. She had not seemed in the least impressed by the fact that he, whom up to this time she had known as merely a visitor at her uncle’s house, a feature of the Lawn-Tennis tournament week, and a person with whom to promenade Merrion Square while the band was playing, was in reality a country gentleman, a J.P., and a man of standing, who owned as good horses as anyone in the county. She even seemed as impervious as ever to the pathos of his position in having thrown himself and his good looks away upon a plain woman six or seven years older than himself. All these things passed quickly through his mind, as if they found an accustomed groove there, and mingled acidly with the disturbing subconsciousness that the mare would inevitably come home with a sore back if her rider did not sit straighter than she was doing at present.

“Look here, Francie,” he said at last, with something of asperity, “it’s all very fine to humbug now, but if you don’t take care you’ll find yourself in the county court some fine day. It’s easier to get there than you’d think,” he added gloomily, “and then there’ll be the devil to pay, and nothing to pay him with; and what’ll you do then?”

“I’ll send for you to come and bail me out!” replied Francie without hesitation, giving an unconsidered whack behind the saddle as she spoke. The black mare at once showed her sense of the liberty by kicking up her heels in a manner that lifted Francie a hand’s-breadth from her seat, and shook her foot out of the stirrup. “Gracious!” she gasped, when she had sufficiently recovered herself to speak; “what did he do? Did he buck-jump? Oh, Mr. Lambert—” as the mare, satisfied with her protest, broke into a sharp trot, “do stop him; I can’t get my foot into the stirrup!”

Lambert, trotting serenely beside her on his tall chestnut, watched her precarious bumpings for a minute or two with a grin, then he stretched out a capable hand, and pulled the mare into a walk.

“Now, where would you be without me?” he inquired.

“Sitting on the road,” replied Francie. “I never felt such a horrid rough thing—and look at Mrs. Lambert looking at me over the wall! Weren’t you a cad that you wouldn’t stop him before?”

In the matter of exercise, Mrs. Lambert was one of those people who want but little here below, nor want that little long. The tour of the two acres that formed the demesne of Rosemount was generally her limit, and any spare energy that remained to her after that perambulation was spent in taking weeds out of the garden path with a lady-like cane-handled spud. This implement was now in her gauntletted hand, and she waved it feebly to the riders as they passed, while Muffy stood in front of her and barked with asthmatic fury.

“Make Miss Fitzpatrick come in to tea on her way home, Roderick,” she called, looking admiringly at the girl with kind eyes that held no spark of jealousy of her beauty and youth. Mrs. Lambert was one of the women who sink prematurely and unresistingly into the sloughs of middle-age. For her there had been no intermediary period of anxious tracking of grey hairs, of fevered energy in the playing of lawn-tennis and rounders; she had seen, with a feeling too sluggish to be respected as resignation, her complexion ascend the scale of colour from possible pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done, bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.

Francie’s first remark, however, after they had passed by, seemed to show that her point of view was not the same as his.

“Won’t she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?” she asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.

“Oh, not she!” said Lambert carelessly, “she has the dog, and she’ll potter about there as happy as possible. She’s all right.” Then after a pause in which the drift of Francie’s question probably presented itself to him for the first time, “I wish everyone was as satisfied with their life as she is.”

“How bad you are!” returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomy sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert’s eyes. “I never heard a man talk such nonsense in my life!”

“My dear child,” said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, “when you’re my age—”

“Which I sha’n’t be for the next fifteen years—” interrupted Francie.

Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.

“Oh, all right! If you’re going to sit on me every time I open my mouth, I’d better shut up.”

Francie with some difficulty brought the black mare beside the chestnut, and put her hand for an instant on Lambert’s arm.

“Ah now, don’t be angry with me!” she said with a glance whose efficacy she had often proved in similar cases; “you know I was only funning.”

“I am not in the least angry with you,” replied Lambert coldly, though his eyes turned in spite of himself to her face.

“Oh, I know very well you’re angry with me,” rejoined Francie, with unfeigned enjoyment of the situation; “your mustash always gets as black as a coal when you’re angry.”

The adornment referred to twitched, but its owner said nothing.

“There now, you’re laughing!” continued Francie, “but it’s quite true; I remember the first time I noticed that, was the time you brought Mrs. Lambert up to town about her teeth, and you took places at the Gaiety for the three of us—and oh! do you remember—” leaning back and laughing whole-heartedly, “she couldn’t get her teeth in in time, and you wanted her to go without any, and she wouldn’t, for fear she might laugh at the pantomime, and I had promised to go to the Dalkey Band that night with the Whittles, and then when you got up to our house and found you’d got the three tickets for nothing, you were so mad that when I came down into the parlour I declare I thought you’d been dyeing your mustash! Aunt Tish said afterwards it was because your face got so white, but I knew it was because you were in such a passion.”

“Well, I didn’t like chucking away fifteen shillings a bit more than anyone else would,” said Lambert.

“Ah, well, we made it up, d’ye remember?” said Francie, regarding him with a laughing eye, in which there was a suspicion of sentiment; “and after all, you were able to change the tickets to another night, and it was ‘Pinafore,’ and you laughed at me so awfully, because I cried at the part where the two lovers are saying good-bye to each other, and poor Mrs. Lambert got her teeth in in a hurry to go with us, and she couldn’t utter the whole night for fear they’d fall out.”

Perhaps the allusions to his wife’s false teeth had a subtly soothing effect on Mr. Lambert. He never was averse to anything that showed that other people were as conscious as he was of the disparity between his own admirable personal equipment and that of Mrs. Lambert; it was another admission of the great fact that he had thrown himself away. His eyebrows and moustache became less truculent, he let himself down with a complacent sarcasm on Francie’s method of holding her whip, and, as they rode on, he permitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of an agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and improvements.

They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of roadside trees, with fields on either side full of buttercups and dog-daisies, a land of pasture and sleek cattle, and neat stone walls. But in the second or third mile the face of the country changed. The blue lake that had lain in the distance like a long slab of lapis lazuli, was within two fields of them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and over the coarse gravel of its shore. The trees had dwindled to ragged hazel and thorn bushes; the fat cows of the comfortable farms round Lismoyle were replaced by lean, dishevelled goats, and shelves and flags of grey limestone began to contest the right of the soil with the thin grass and the wiry brushwood. We have said grey limestone, but that hard-worked adjective cannot at all express the cold, pure blueness that these boulders take, under the sky of summer. Some word must yet be coined in which neither blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the steely purple of a pigeon’s breast shall not be forgotten.

The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last squeezed out of existence, and inland, over the slowly swelling hills, it lay like the pavement of some giant city, that had been jarred from its symmetry by an earthquake. A mile away, on the further side of this iron belt, a clump of trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two-storied white house, and towards these trees the road wound its sinuous way. The grass began to show in larger and larger patches between the rocks, and the indomitable hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their low canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. A stream, brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles with the boulders, made a boundary between the stony wilderness and the dark green pastures of Gurthnamuckla. It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such excitement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved her neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lambert’s horse.

Just beyond the bridge, a repulsive-looking old man was sitting on a heap of stones, turning over the contents of a dirty linen pouch. Beside him were an empty milk-can, and a black-and-white dog which had begun by trying to be a collie, and had relapsed into an indifferent attempt at a grey-hound. It greeted the riders with the usual volley of barking, and its owner let fall some of the coppers that he was counting over, in his haste to strike at it with the long stick that was lying beside him.

“Have done! Sailor! Blasht yer sowl! Have done!” then, with honeyed obsequiousness, “yer honour’s welcome, Mr. Lambert.”

“Is Miss Duffy in the house?” asked Lambert.

“She is, she is, yer honour,” he answered, in the nasal mumble peculiar to his class, getting up and beginning to shuffle after the horses; “but what young lady is this at all? Isn’t she very grand, God bless her!”

“She’s Miss Fitzpatrick, Miss Mullen’s cousin, Billy,” answered Lambert graciously; approbation could not come from a source too low for him to be susceptible to it.

The old man came up beside Francie, and, clutching the skirt of her habit, blinked at her with sly and swimming eyes.

“Fitzpatrick is it? Begob I knew her grannema well; she was a fine hearty woman, the Lord have mercy on her! And she never seen me without she’d give me a shixpence or maybe a shillin’.”

Francie was skilled in the repulse of the Dublin beggar, but this ancestral precedent was something for which she was not prepared. The clutch tightened on her habit and the disgusting old face almost touched it, as Billy pressed close to her, mouthing out incomprehensible blessings and entreaties. She felt afraid of his red eyes and clawing fingers, and she turned helplessly to Lambert.

“Here, be off now, Billy, you old fool!” he said; “we’ve had enough of you. Run and open the gate.”

The farm-house, with its clump of trees, was close to them, and its drooping iron entrance-gate shrieked resentfully as the old man dragged it open.