The drive in the spring-cart was the first moment of comparative ease from suffering that Julia had known that day. Her tormented brain was cooled by the soft steady rush of air in her face, and the mouthful of “potheen” that she had drunk had at first the effect of dulling all her perceptions. The cart drove up the back avenue, and at the yard gate Julia asked the man to put her down. She clambered out of the cart with great difficulty, and going round to the hall door, went toilfully up the steps and rang the bell. Sir Benjamin was out, Lady Dysart was out, Mr. Dysart was out; so Gorman told her, with a doubtful look at the black Sunday gown that seemed to him indicative of the bearer of a begging petition, and he did not know when they would be in. He shut the door, and Julia went slowly down the steps again.

She had begun to walk mechanically away from the house, when she saw Sir Benjamin in his chair coming up a side walk. His face, with its white hair, gold spectacles, and tall hat, looked so sane and dignified, that, in spite of what Norry had said, she determined to carry out her first intention of speaking to him. She shivered, though the sun blazed hotly down upon her, as she walked towards the chair, not from nervousness, but from the creeping sense of illness, and the ground rose up in front of her as if she were going up-hill. She made a low bow to her landlord, and James Canavan, who knew her by sight, stopped the onward course of the chair.

“I wish to speak to you on an important matter, Sir Benjamin,” began Julia in her best voice; “I was unable to see your agent, so I determined to come to yourself.”

The gold spectacles were turned upon her fixedly, and the expression of the eyes behind them was more intelligent than usual.

“Begad, that’s one of the tenants, James,” said Sir Benjamin, looking up at his attendant.

“Certainly, Sir Benjamin, certainly; this lady is Miss Duffy, from Gurthnamuckla,” replied the courtly James Canavan. “An old tenant, I might almost say an old friend of your honour’s.”

“And what the devil brings her here?” inquired Sir Benjamin, glowering at her under the wide brim of his hat.

“Sir Benjamin,” began Julia again, “I know your memory’s failing you, but you might remember that after the death of my father, Hubert Duffy—” Julia felt all the Protestant and aristocratic associations of the name as she said it—“you made a promise to me in your office that I should never be disturbed in my holding of the land.”

“Devil so ugly a man as Hubert Duffy ever I saw,” said Sir Benjamin, with a startling flight of memory; “and you’re his daughter, are you? Begad, the dairymaid didn’t distinguish herself!”

“Yes, I am his daughter, Sir Benjamin,” replied Julia, catching at this flattering recognition. “I and my family have always lived on your estate, and my grandfather has often had the honour of entertaining you and the rest of the gentry, when they came fox-hunting through Gurthnamuckla. I am certain that it is by no wish of yours, or of your kind and honourable son, Mr. Christopher, that your agent is pairsecuting me to make me leave the farm—” Her voice failed her, partly from the suffocating anger that rose in her at her own words, and partly from a dizziness that made the bath-chair, Sir Benjamin, and James Canavan, float up and down in the air before her.

Sir Benjamin suddenly began to brandish his stick. “What the devil is she saying about Christopher? What has Christopher to say to my tenants. D—n his insolence! He ought to be at school!”

The remarkable grimaces which James Canavan made at Julia from the back of the bath-chair informed her that she had lighted upon the worst possible method of ingratiating herself with her landlord, but the information came too late.

“Send that woman away, James Canavan!” he screamed, making sweeps at her with his oak stick. “She shall never put her d—d splay foot upon my avenue again. I’ll thrash her and Christopher out of the place! Turn her out, I tell you, James Canavan!”

Julia stood motionless and aghast beyond the reach of the stick, until James Canavan motioned to her to move aside; she staggered back among the long arms of a lignum vitÆ, and the bath-chair, with its still cursing, gesticulating occupant, went by her at a round pace. Then she came slowly and uncertainly out on to the path again, and looked after the chariot wheels of the CÆsar to whom she had appealed.

James Canavan’s coat-tails were standing out behind him as he drove the bath-chair round the corner of the path, and Sir Benjamin’s imprecations came faintly back to her as she stood waiting till the throbbing giddiness should cease sufficiently for her to begin the homeward journey that stretched, horrible and impossible, before her. Her head ached wildly, and as she walked down the avenue she found herself stumbling against the edge of the grass, now on one side and now on the other. She said to herself that the people would say she was drunk, but she didn’t care now what they said. It would be shortly till they saw her a disgraced woman, with the sheriff coming to put her out of her father’s house on to the road. She gave a hard, short sob as this occurred to her, and she wondered if she would have the good luck to die, supposing she let herself fall down on the grass, and lay there in the burning sun and took no more trouble about anything. Her thoughts came to her slowly and with great difficulty, but, once come, they whirled and hammered in her brain with the reiteration of chiming bells. She walked on, out of the gate, and along the road to Lismoyle, mechanically going in the shade where there was any, and avoiding the patches of broken stones, as possibly a man might who was walking out to be shot, but apathetically unconscious of what was happening.

At about this time the person whose name Julia Duffy had so unfortunately selected to conjure with was sitting under a tree on the slope opposite the hall door at Tally Ho, reading aloud a poem of Rossetti’s.

Francie’s attention, which had revived at the description of the Queen, began to wander again. The sound in Christopher’s voice told that the words were touching something deeper than his literary perception, and her sympathy answered to the tone, though the drift of the poem was dark to her. The music of the lines had just power enough upon her ear to predispose her to sentiment, and at present, sentiment with Francie meant the tender repose of her soul upon the thought of Mr. Gerald Hawkins.

A pause at turning over a leaf recalled her again to the fact of Christopher, with a transition not altogether unpleasant; she looked down at him as he lay on the grass, and began to wonder, as she had several times wondered before, if he really were in love with her. Nothing seemed more unlikely. Francie admitted it to herself as she watched his eyes following the lines in complete absorption, and knew that she had neither part nor lot in the things that touched him most nearly.

But the facts were surprising, there was no denying that. Even without Charlotte to tell her so she was aware that Christopher detested the practice of paying visits even more sincerely than most men, and was certainly not in the habit of visiting in Lismoyle. Except to see her, there was no reason that could bring him to Tally Ho. Surer than all fact, however, and rising superior to mere logic, was her instinctive comprehension of men and their ways, and sometimes she was almost sure that he came, not from kindness, or from that desire to improve her mind which she had discerned and compassionated, but because he could not help himself. She had arrived at one of these thrilling moments of certainty when Christopher’s voice ceased upon the words, “Thy jealous God,” and she knew that the time had come for her to say something appropriate.

“Oh thank you, Mr. Dysart—that’s—that’s awfully pretty. It’s a sort of religious thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Christopher, looking at her with a wavering smile, and feeling as if he had stepped suddenly to the ground out of a dream of flying; “the hero’s a pilgrim, and that’s always something.”

“I know a lovely song called ‘The Pilgrim of Love,’” said Francie timidly; “of course it wasn’t the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice too.”

Christopher looked up at her, and was almost convinced that she must have absorbed something of the sentiment if not the sense of what he had read, her face was so sympathetic and responsive. With that expression in her limpid eyes it gave him a peculiar sensation to hear her say the name of Love; it was even a delight, and fired his imagination with the picturing of what it would be like to hear her say it with all her awakened soul. He might have said something that would have suggested his feeling, in the fragmentary, inferential manner that Francie never knew what to make of, but that her eyes strayed away at a click of the latch of the avenue gate, and lost their unworldliness in the sharp and easy glance that is the unvalued privilege of the keen-sighted.

“Who in the name of goodness is this?” she said, sitting up and gazing at a black figure in the avenue; “it’s some woman or other, but she looks very queer.”

“I can’t see that it matters much who it is,” said Christopher irritably, “so long as she doesn’t come up here, and she probably will if you let her see you.”

“Mercy on us! she looks awful!” exclaimed Francie incautiously; “why, it’s Miss Duffy, and her face as red as I don’t know what—oh, she’s seen us!”

The voice had evidently reached Julia Duffy’s ears; she came stumbling on, with her eyes fixed on the light blue dress under the beech tree, and when Christopher had turned, and got his eye-glass up, she was standing at the foot of the slope, looking at him with a blurred recognition.

“Mr. Dysart,” she said in a hoarse voice, that, combined with her flushed face and staring eyes, made Christopher think she was drunk, “Sir Benjamin has driven me out of his place like a beggar; me, whose family is as long on his estate as himself; and his agent wants to drive me out of my farm that was promised to me by your father I should never be disturbed in it.”

“You’re Miss Duffy from Gurthnamuckla, are you not?” interrupted Christopher, eyeing her with natural disfavour, as he got up and came down the slope towards her.

“I am, Mr. Dysart, I am,” she said defiantly, “and you and your family have a right to know me, and I ask you to do me justice, that I shall not be turned out into the ditch for the sake of a lying double-faced schemer—” Her voice failed, as it had failed before when she spoke to Sir Benjamin, and the action of her hand that carried on her meaning had a rage in it that hid its despair.

“I think if you have anything to say you had better write it,” said Christopher, beginning to think that Lambert had some excuse for his opinion of Miss Duffy, but beginning also to pity what he thought was a spectacle of miserable middle-aged drunkenness; “you may be sure that no injustice will be done to you—”

“Is it injustice?” broke in Julia, while the fever cloud seemed to roll its weight back for a moment from her brain; “maybe you’d say there was injustice if you knew all I know. Where’s Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? ’Tis to say that to her I came here, and to tell her ’twas she lent money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he’d go bankrupt on me, and she’s to have my farm and my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the gentry—”

Her voice had become wilder and louder, and Christopher, uncomfortably aware that Francie could hear this indictment of Miss Mullen as distinctly as he did, intervened again.

“Look here, Miss Duffy,” he said in a lower voice, “it’s no use talking like this. If I can help you I will, but it would be a good deal better if you went home now. You—you seem ill, and it’s a great mistake to stay here exciting yourself and making a noise. Write to me, and I’ll see that you get fair play.”

Julia threw back her head and laughed, with a venom that seemed too concentrated for drunkenness.

“Ye’d better see ye get fair play yerself before you talk so grand about it!” She pointed up at Francie. “Mrs. Dysart indeed!”—she bowed with a sarcastic exaggeration, that in saner moments she would not have been capable of—“Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days I suppose!”—she bowed again. “That’s what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye,” addressing herself to Christopher, “and ye’ll not get away from that one till ye’re under her foot!”

She laughed again; her face became vacant and yet full of pain, and she staggered away down the avenue, talking violently and gesticulating with her hands.