Nearly three weeks had gone by since Mrs. Beattie’s party, and as Charlotte Mullen walked slowly along the road towards Rosemount one afternoon, her eyes fixed on the square toes of her boots, and her hands, as was her custom, in the pockets of her black jacket, she meditated agreeably upon recent events. Of these perhaps the pleasantest was Mr. Hawkins’ departure to Hythe, for a musketry course, which had taken place somewhat unexpectedly a fortnight ago. He was a good-for-nothing young limb, and engagement or no engagement it was a good job he was out of the place; and, after all, Francie had not seemed to mind. Almost equally satisfactory was the recollection of that facetious letter to Christopher Dysart, in which she had so playfully reminded him of the ancient promise to photograph the Tally Ho cats, and hoped that she and her cousin would not come under that category. Its success had even been surprising, for not only had Christopher come and spent a long afternoon in that difficult enterprise, but had come again more than once, on pretexts that had appeared to Charlotte satisfactorily flimsy, and had apparently set aside what she knew to be his repugnance to herself. That he should lend Francie “John Inglesant” and Rossetti’s Poems, made Charlotte laugh in her sleeve. She had her own very sound opinion of her cousin’s literary capacity, and had no sympathy for the scientific interest felt by a philosopher in the evolution of a nascent soul. Christopher’s manner did not, it is true, coincide with her theory of a lover, which was crude, and founded on taste rather than experience, but she had imagination enough to recognise that Christopher, in love-making, as in most other things, would pursue methods unknown to her.

At this point in her reflections, congratulation began to wane. She thought she knew every twist and turn in Roddy Lambert, but lately she had not been able to explain him at all to her satisfaction. He was always coming to Tally Ho, and he always seemed in a bad temper when he was there; in fact she had never known him as ill-mannered as he was last week, one day when he and Christopher were there together, and she had tried, for various excellent reasons, to get him off into the dining-room to talk business. She couldn’t honestly say that Francie was running after him, though of course she had that nasty flirty way with every man, old or young, married or single; but all the same, there was something in it she didn’t like. The girl was more trouble than she was worth; and if it wasn’t for Christopher Dysart she’d have sent her packing back to Letitia Fitzpatrick, and told her that whether she could manage it or not she must keep her. But of course to have Sir Christopher Dysart of Bruff—she rolled the title on her tongue—as a cousin was worthy of patience.

As she walked up the trim Rosemount avenue she spied the owner of the house lying in a basket-chair in the shade, with a pipe in his mouth, and in his hand that journal politely described by Mrs. Rattray as the “the Pink One.”

“Hallo, Charlotte!” he said lazily, glancing up at her from under the peak of his cap, “you look warm.”

“And you look what you are, and that’s cool, in manners and body,” retorted Miss Mullen, coming and standing beside him, “and if you had tramped on your four bones through the dust, maybe you’d be as hot as I am.”

“What do you wear that thick coat for?” he said, looking at it with a disfavour that he took no trouble to hide.

Charlotte became rather red. She had the Irish peasant-woman’s love of heavy clothing and dislike of abating any item of it in summer.

“If you had my tendency to bronchitis, me fine fellow,” she said, seating herself on the uncomfortable garden bench beside which his chair had been placed, “you’d think more of your health than your appearance.”

“Very likely,” said Mr. Lambert, yawning and relapsing into silence.

“Well, Roddy,” resumed Charlotte more amicably, “I didn’t walk all the way here to discuss the fashions with you. Have y’any more news from the seat of war?”

“No; confound her, she won’t stir, and I don’t see what’s going to make her unless I evict her.”

“Why don’t ye writ her for the money?” said Charlotte, the spirit of her attorney grandfather gleaming in her eyes; “that’d frighten her!”

“I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I spoke to her about the lodge that Lady Dysart said she could have, and the old devil was fit to be tied; but we might get her to it before we’ve done with her.”

“If it was me I’d writ her now,” repeated Charlotte venomously; “you’ll find you’ll have to come to it in the end.”

“It’s a sin to see that lovely pasture going to waste,” said Lambert, leaning back and puffing at his pipe. “Peter Joyce hasn’t six head of cattle on it this minute.”

“If you and I had it, Roddy,” said Charlotte, eyeing him with a curious, guarded tenderness, “it wouldn’t be that way.”

Some vibration of the strong, incongruous tremor that passed through her as she spoke, reached Lambert’s indolent perception and startled it. It reminded him of the nebulous understanding that taking her money seemed to have involved him in; he believed he knew why she had given it to him, and though he knew also that he held his advantage upon precarious terms, even his coarse-fibred nature found something repellent in the thought of having to diplomatise with such affections as Charlotte’s.

“I was up at Murphy’s yesterday,” he said, as if his train of ideas had not been interrupted. “He has a grand filly there that I’d buy to-morrow if I had the money, or any place to put her. There’s a pot of money in her.”

“Well, if you’ll get me Gurthnamuckla,” said Charlotte with a laugh, in which nervousness was strangely apparent, “you may buy up every young horse in the country and stable them in the parlour, so long as you’ll leave the attics for me and the cats.”

Lambert turned his head upon its cushion, and looked at her.

“I think I’ll leave you a little more space than that, Charlotte, if ever we stable our horses together.”

She glanced at him, as aware of the double entendre, and as stirred by it as he had intended her to be. Perhaps a little more than he had intended; at all events, he jerked himself into a sitting position, and, getting on to his feet, stretched himself with almost ostentatious ease.

“Where’s Francie?” he asked, yawning.

“At home, dressmaking,” replied Miss Mullen. She was a little paler than usual. “I think I’ll go in now and have a cup of tea with Lucy,” she said, rising from the garden bench with something like an effort.

“Well, I daresay I’ll take the mare down to Tally Ho, and make Francie go for a ride,” said Lambert; “it’s a pity for anyone to be stewing in the house on a day like this.”

“I wanted her to come here with me, but she wouldn’t,” Charlotte called after him as he turned towards the path that led to the stables. “Maybe she thought there might be metal more attractive for her at home!”

She grinned to herself as she went up the steps. “Me gentleman may put that in his pipe and smoke it,” she thought; “that little hussy would let him think it was for him she was sitting at home!”

Ever since Mrs. Lambert’s first entrance into Lismoyle society, she had found in Charlotte her most intimate and reliable ally. If Mr. Lambert had been at all uneasy as to his bride’s reception by Miss Mullen, he must have been agreeably surprised to find that after a month or so Charlotte had become as useful and pleasant to Mrs. Lambert as in older days she had been to him. That Charlotte should have recognised the paramount necessity of his marrying money, had been to Lambert a proof of her eminent common sense. He had always been careful to impress his obvious destiny upon her, and he had always been grateful to that destiny for having harmlessly fulfilled itself, while yet old Mrs. Mullen’s money was in her own keeping, and her niece was, beyond all question, ineligible. That was Mr. Lambert’s view of the situation; whatever Charlotte’s opinion was, she kept it to herself.

Mrs. Lambert was more than usually delighted to see her ever-sympathising friend on this hot afternoon. One of her chiefest merits in the turkey-hen’s eyes was that she “was as good as any doctor, and twice better than Dr. Rattray, who would never believe the half she went through with palpitations, and buzzings in her ears and roarings in her head,” and the first half hour or so of her visit was consumed in minute detail of her more recent symptoms. The fact that large numbers of women entertain their visitors with biographies, mainly abusive, of their servants, has been dwelt on to weariness by many writers; but, nevertheless, in no history of Mrs. Lambert could this characteristic be conscientiously omitted.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, as her second cup of sweet weak tea was entered upon, “you know that Eliza Hackett, that I got with the highest recommendations from the Honourable Miss Carrick, and thinking she’d be so steady, being a Protestant? Well, last Sunday she went to mass!” She paused, and Charlotte, one of whose most genuine feelings was a detestation of Roman Catholics, exclaimed:

“Goodness alive! what did you let her do that for?”

“How could I stop her?” answered Mrs. Lambert plaintively, “she never told one in the house she was going, and this morning, when I was looking at the meat with her in the larder, I took the opportunity to speak to her about it. ‘Oh,’ says she, turning round as cool as you please, ‘I consider the Irish Church hasn’t the Apostolic succession!’”

“You don’t tell me that fat-faced Eliza Hackett said that?” ejaculated Charlotte.

“She did, indeed,” replied Mrs. Lambert deplorably; “I was quite upset. ‘Eliza,’ says I, ‘I wonder you have the impudence to talk to me like that. You that was taught better by the Honourable Miss Carrick.’ ‘Ma’am,’ says she, up to my face, ‘Moses and Aaron was two holy Roman Catholic priests, and that’s more than you can say of the archdeacon!’ ‘Indeed, no,’ says I, ‘thank God he’s not!’ but I ask you, Charlotte, what could I say to a woman like that, that would wrest the Scriptures to her own purposes?”

Even Charlotte’s strong brain reeled in the attempt to follow the arguments of Eliza the cook and Mrs. Lambert.

“Well, upon my word, Lucy, it’s little I’d have argued with her. I’d have just said to her, ‘Out of my house you march, if you don’t go to your church!’ I think that would have composed her religious scruples.”

“Oh! but, Charlotte,” pleaded the turkey-hen, “I couldn’t part with her; she knows just what gentlemen like, and Roderick’s so particular about savouries. When I told him about her, he said he wouldn’t care if she was a Mormon and had a dozen husbands, so long as she made good soup.”

Charlotte laughed out loud. Mr. Lambert’s turn of humour had a robustness about it that always roused a sympathetic chord in her.

“Well, that’s a man all over! His stomach before anyone else’s soul!”

“Oh, Charlotte, you shouldn’t say such things! Indeed, Roderick will often take only the one cut of meat at his dinner these times, and if it isn’t to his liking he’ll take nothing; he’s a great epicure. I don’t know what’s over him those last few weeks,” continued Mrs. Lambert gloomily, “unless it’s the hot weather, and all the exercise he’s taking, that’s making him cross.”

“Well, from all I’ve ever seen of men,” said Charlotte, with a laugh, “the hotter they get the better pleased they are. Take my word for it, there’s no time a man’s so proud of himself as when he’s ‘larding the lean earth’!”

Mrs. Lambert looked bewildered, but was too much affaired with her own thoughts to ask for an explanation of what seemed to her a strange term in cookery.

“Did he know Francie Fitzpatrick much in Dublin?” she said after a pause, in which she had given a saucerful of cream and sopped cake to her dog.

Charlotte looked at her hostess suddenly and searchingly as she stooped with difficulty to take up the saucer.

“He’s known her since she was a child,” she replied, and waited for further developments.

“I thought it must be that way,” said Mrs. Lambert with a dissatisfied sound in her voice; “they’re so very familiar-like talking to each other.”

Charlotte’s heart paused for an instant in its strong, regular course. Was it possible, she thought, that wisdom was being perfected in the mouth of Lucy Lambert?

“I never noticed anything so wonderfully familiar,” she said, in a tone meant to provoke further confidence; “I never knew Roddy yet that he wasn’t civil to a pretty girl; and as for Francie, any man comes handy to her! Upon my word, she’d dote on a tongs, as they say!”

Mrs. Lambert fidgeted nervously with her long gold watchchain. “Well, Charlotte,” she said, a little defiantly, “I’ve been married to him five years now, and I’ve never known him particular with any girl.”

“Then, my dear woman, what’s this nonsense you’re talking about him and Francie?” said Charlotte, with Mephistophelian gaiety.

“Oh, Charlotte!” said Mrs. Lambert, suddenly getting very red, and beginning to whimper, “I never thought to speak of it—” she broke off and began to look for her handkerchief, while her respectable middle-aged face began to wrinkle up like a child’s, “and, indeed, I don’t want to say anything against the girl, for she’s a nice girl, and so I’ve always found her, but I can’t help noticing—” she broke off again.

“What can’t ye help noticing?” demanded Charlotte roughly.

Mrs. Lambert drew a long breath that was half-suffocated by a sob. “Oh, I don’t know,” she cried helplessly; “he’s always going down to Tally Ho, by the way he’ll take her out riding or boating or something, and though he doesn’t say much, a little thing’ll slip out now and again, and you can’t say a word to him but he’ll get cross.”

“Maybe he’s in trouble about money unknown to you,” suggested Charlotte, who, for some reason or other, was not displaying her usual capacity for indictment, “or maybe he finds ‘life not worth living because of the liver’!” she ended, with a mirthless laugh.

“Oh, no, no, Charlotte; indeed, it’s no laughing joke at all—” Mrs. Lambert hesitated, then, with a little hysterical burst of sobs, “he talks about her in his sleep!” she quavered out, and began to cry miserably.

Charlotte sat perfectly still, looking at Mrs. Lambert with eyes that saw, but held no pity for, her abundant tears. How far more serious was this thing, if true, to her, than to that contemptible whining creature, whose snuffling gasps were exasperating her almost beyond the bounds of endurance. She waited till there was a lull.

“What did he say about her?” she asked in a hard, jeering voice.

“Oh, Charlotte, how can I tell you? all sorts of things he says, nonsense like, and springing up and saying she’ll be drowned.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort to you,” said Charlotte, “she cares no more for him than the man in the moon! She has other fish to fry, I can tell you!”

“But what signifies that, Charlotte,” sighed Mrs. Lambert, “so long as he thinks about her?”

“Tell him he’s a fool to waste his time over her,” suggested Charlotte scoffingly.

“Is it me tell him such a thing!” The turkey-hen lifted her wet red eyes from her saturated pocket handkerchief and began to laugh hysterically. “Much regard he has for what I say to him! Oh, don’t make me laugh, Charlotte—” a frightened look came over her face, as if she had been struck, and she fell back in her chair. “It’s the palpitations,” she said faintly, with her hand on her heart. “Oh, I’m going—I’m going—”

Charlotte ran to the chimney-piece, and took from it a bottle of smelling salts. She put it to Mrs. Lambert’s nose with one hand, and with the other unfastened the neck of her dress without any excitement or fuss. Her eyes were keen and quiet as she bent over the pale blotched face that lay on the antimacassar; and when Mrs. Lambert began to realise again what was going on round her, she was conscious of a hand chafing her own, a hand that was both gentle and skilful.