That evening when Mrs. Fitzpatrick was putting on her best cap and her long cameo ear-rings she said to her husband:

“Well now, Robert, you mark my words, he’s after her.”

“Tchah!” replied Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was not in a humour to admit that any woman could be attractive, owing to the postponement of his tea by his wife so that cakes might be baked in Mr. Lambert’s honour; “you can’t see a man without thinking he’s in love with someone or other.”

“I suppose you think it’s to see yourself he’s come all the way from Lismoyle,” rejoined Mrs. Fitzpatrick with becoming spirit, “and says he’s going to stop at Breslin’s Hotel for a week?”

“Oh, very well, have it your own way,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick acrimoniously, “I suppose you have it all settled, and he’ll be married to her by special license before the week’s out.”

“Well, I don’t care, Robert, you wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d only buried his wife four months and a half ago—though I will say he’s in deep mourning—but for all that no one’d blame him that he didn’t think much of that poor creature, and ’twould be a fine match for Francie if she’d take him.”

“Would she take him!” echoed Mr. Fitzpatrick scornfully; “would a duck swim? I never saw the woman yet that wouldn’t half hang herself to get married!”

“Ah, have done being so cross, Robert, Christmas day and all; I wonder you married at all since you think so little of women.”

Finding this argument not easy to answer, Mr. Fitzpatrick said nothing, and his wife, too much interested to linger over side issues, continued,

“The girls say they heard him asking her to drive to the Dargle with him to-morrow, and he’s brought a grand box of sweets for the children as a Christmas box, and six lovely pair of gloves for Francie! ’Pon me word, I call her a very lucky girl!”

“Well, if I was a woman it isn’t that fellow I’d fancy,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, unexpectedly changing his ground, “but as, thank God, I’m not, it’s no affair of mine.” Having delivered himself of this sentiment, Mr. Fitzpatrick went downstairs. The smell of hot cakes rose deliciously upon the air, and, as his niece emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of them in her hand, and called to him to hurry before they got cold, he thought to himself that Lambert would have the best of the bargain if he married her.

Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account, any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a butter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he liked, she thought, with a little flash of amusement and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.

The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on the smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie’s spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure parties that vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.

“Doesn’t it look fearful lonely to-day?” said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself highly. “You can’t hear a thing but the running of the water.”

They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking down the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming race among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.

“I don’t call it lonely,” said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courtship; “how many more would you like?”

“Oh, lots,” replied Francie, “but I’m not going to tell you who they are!”

“I know one, anyhow,” said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.

When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.

“Who do you know?”

Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart’s-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.

“Wouldn’t you like it now if you saw—” he paused and looked at Francie—“who shall we say—Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?”

“I wouldn’t care.”

“Wouldn’t you though! You’d run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle,” said Lambert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.

The strip of hart’s-tongue could not conceal a rising glow in the face behind it, but Francie’s voice was as undaunted as ever as she replied,

“Who told you I ran for my life?”

“You told me so yourself.”

“I didn’t. I only told you I’d had a row with her.”

“Well, that’s as good as saying you had to run. You don’t suppose I thought you’d get the better of Charlotte?”

“I daresay you didn’t, because you’re afraid of her yourself!”

There was a degree of truth in this that made Mr. Lambert suddenly realise Francie’s improper levity about serious things.

“I’ll tell you one thing I’m afraid of,” he said severely, “and that is that you made a mistake in fighting with Charlotte. If you’d chosen to—to do as she wished, she’s easy enough to get on with.”

Francie flung her fern over the parapet and made no answer.

“I suppose you know she’s moved into Gurthnamuckla?” he went on.

“I know nothing about anything,” interrupted Francie; “I don’t know how long it isn’t since you wrote to me, and when you do you never tell me anything. You might be all dead and buried down there for all I know or care!”

The smallest possible glance under her eyelids tempered this statement and confused Mr. Lambert’s grasp of his subject.

“Do you mean that, about not caring if I was dead or no? I daresay you do. No one cares now what happens to me.”

He almost meant what he said, her elusiveness was so exasperating, and his voice told his sincerity. Last summer she would have laughed pitilessly at his pathos, and made it up with him afterwards. But she was changed since last summer, and now as she looked at him she felt a forlorn kinship with him.

“Ah, what nonsense!” she said caressingly. “I’d be awfully sorry if anything happened you.” As if he could not help himself he took her hand, but before he could speak she had drawn it away. “Indeed, you might have been dead,” she went on hurriedly, “for all you told me in your letters. Begin now and tell me the Lismoyle news. I think you said the Dysarts were away from Bruff still, didn’t you?”

Lambert felt as if a hot and a cold spray of water had been turned on him alternately. “The Dysarts? Oh, yes, they’ve been away for some time,” he said, recovering himself; “they’ve been in London, I believe, staying with her people, since you’re so anxious to know about them.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to know about them?” said Francie, getting off the wall. “Come on and walk a bit; it’s cold sitting here.”

Lambert walked on by her side rather sulkily; he was angry with himself for having let his feelings run away with him, and he was angry with Francie for pulling him up so quickly.

“Christopher Dysart’s off again,” he said abruptly; “he’s got another of these diplomatic billets.” He believed that Francie would find the information unpleasant, and he was in some contradictory way disappointed that she seemed quite unaffected by it. “He’s unpaid attachÉ to old Lord Castlemore at Copenhagen,” he went on; “he started last week.”

So Christopher was gone from her too, and never wrote her a line before he went. They’re all the same, she thought, all they want is to spoon a girl for a bit, and if she lets them do it they get sick of her, and whatever she does they forget her the next minute. And there was Roddy Lambert trying to squeeze her hand just now, and poor Mrs. Lambert, that was worth a dozen of him, not dead six months. She walked on, and forced herself to talk to him, and to make inquiries about the Bakers, Dr. Rattray, Mr. Corkran, and other lights of Lismoyle society. It was absurd, but it was none the less true that the news that Mr. Corkran was engaged to Carrie Beattie gave her an additional pang. The enamoured glances of the curate were fresh in her memory, and the thought that they were being now bestowed upon Carrie Beattie’s freckles and watering eyes was, though ludicrous, not altogether pleasing. She burst out laughing suddenly.

“I’m thinking of what all the Beatties will look like dressed as bridesmaids,” she explained; “four of them, and every one of them roaring, crying, and their noses bright red!”

The day was clouding over a little, and a damp wind began to stir among the leaves that still hung red on the beech trees. Lambert insisted with paternal determination that Francie should put on the extra coat that he was carrying for her, and the couple who had recently passed them, and whom they had now overtaken, looked at them sympathetically, and were certain that they also were engaged. It took some time to reach the far gate of the Dargle, sauntering as they did from bend to bend of the road, and stopping occasionally to look down at the river, or up at the wooded height opposite, with conventional expressions of admiration; and by the time they had passed down between the high evergreens at the lodge, to where the car was waiting for them, Francie had heard all that Lambert could tell her of Lismoyle news. She had also been told what a miserable life Mr. Lambert’s was, and how lonely he was at Rosemount since poor Lucy’s death, and she knew how many young horses he had at grass on Gurthnamuckla, but neither mentioned the name of Mr. Hawkins.

The day of the Dargle expedition was Tuesday, and during the remainder of the week Mr. Lambert became so familiar a visitor at Albatross Villa, that Bridget learned to know his knock, and did not trouble herself to pull down her sleeves, or finish the mouthful of bread and tea with which she had left the kitchen, before she opened the door. Aunt Tish did not attempt to disguise her satisfaction when he was present, and rallied Francie freely in his absence; the children were quite aware of the state of affairs, having indeed discussed the matter daily with Bridget; and Uncle Robert, going gloomily up to his office in Dublin, had to admit to himself that Lambert was certainly paying her great attention, and that after all, all things considered, it would be a good thing for the girl to get a rich husband for herself when she had the chance. It was rather soon after his wife’s death for a man to come courting, but of course the wedding wouldn’t come off till the twelve months were up, and at the back of these reflections was the remembrance that he, Uncle Robert, was Francie’s trustee, and that the security in which he had invested her five hundred pounds was becoming less sound than he could have wished.

As is proverbially the case, the principal persons concerned were not as aware as the lookers-on of the state of the game. Francie, to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils, did not feel that anything much out of the common was going on, though she knew quite well that Mr. Lambert was very fond of her; and Mr. Lambert had so firmly resolved on allowing a proper interval to elapse between his wife’s death and that election of her successor upon which he was determined, that he looked upon the present episode as of small importance, and merely a permissible relaxation to a man whose hunting had been stopped, and who had, in a general way, been having the devil of a dull time. He was to go back to Lismoyle on Monday, the first of the year; and it was settled that he was to take Francie on Sunday afternoon to walk on Kingstown pier. The social laws of Mrs Fitzpatrick’s world were not rigorous, still less was her interpretation of them; an unchaperoned expedition to Kingstown pier would not, under any circumstances, have scandalised her, and considering that Lambert was an old friend and had been married, the proceeding became almost prudishly correct. As she stood at her window and saw them turn the corner of the road on their way to the station, she observed to Mabel that there wouldn’t be a handsomer couple going the pier than what they were, Francie had that stylish way with her that she always gave a nice set to a skirt, and it was wonderful the way she could trim up an old hat the same as new.

It was a very bright clear afternoon, and a touch of frost in the air gave the snap and brilliancy that are often lacking in an Irish winter day. On such a Sunday Kingstown pier assumes a fair semblance of its spring and summer gaiety; the Kingstown people walk there because there is nothing else to be done at Kingstown, and the Dublin people come down to snatch what they can of sea air before the short afternoon darkens, and the hour arrives when they look out for members of the St. George’s Yacht Club to take them in to tea. There was a fair sprinkling of people on the long arm of granite that curves for a mile into Dublin Bay, and as Mr. Lambert paced along it he was as agreeably conscious as his companion of the glances that met and followed their progress. It satisfied his highest ambition that the girl of his choice should be thus openly admired by men whom, year after year, he had looked up at with envious respect as they stood in the bow-window of Kildare Street Club, with figures that time was slowly shaping to its circular form, on the principle of correspondence with environment. He was a man who had always valued his possessions according to other people’s estimation of them, and this afternoon Francie gained a new distinction in his eyes.

Abstract admiration, however, was one thing, but the very concrete attentions of Mr. Thomas Whitty were quite another affair. Before they had been a quarter of an hour on the pier, Francie was hailed by her Christian name, and this friend of her youth, looking more unmistakably than ever a solicitor’s clerk, joined them, flushed with the effort of overtaking them, and evidently determined not to leave them again.

“I spotted you by your hair, Francie,” Mr. Whitty was pleased to observe, after the first greetings; “you must have been getting a new dye for it; I could see it a mile off!”

“Oh, yes,” responded Francie, “I tried a new bottle the other day, the same you use for your moustache, y’know! I thought I’d like people to be able to see it without a spy-glass.”

As Mr. Whitty’s moustache was represented by three sickly hairs and a pimple, the sarcasm was sufficiently biting to yield Lambert a short-lived gratification.

“Mr. Lambert dyes his black,” continued Francie, without a change of countenance. She had the Irish love of a scrimmage in her, and she thought it would be great fun to make Mr. Lambert cross.

“D’ye find the colour comes off?” murmured Tommy Whitty, eager for revenge, but too much afraid of Lambert to speak out loud.

Even Francie, though she favoured the repartee with a giggle, was glad that Lambert had not heard.

“D’ye find you want your ears boxed?” she returned in the same tone of voice; “I won’t walk with you if you don’t behave.” Inwardly, however, she decided that Tommy Whitty was turning into an awful cad, and felt that she would have given a good deal to have wiped out some lively passages in her previous acquaintance with him.

At the end of half an hour Mr. Whitty was still with them, irrepressibly intimate and full of reminiscence. Lambert, after determined efforts to talk to Francie, as if unaware of the presence of a third person, had sunk into dangerous silence, and Francie had ceased to see the amusing side of the situation, and was beginning to be exhausted by much walking to and fro. The sun set in smoky crimson behind the town, the sun-set gun banged its official recognition of the fact, followed by the wild, clear notes of a bugle, and a frosty after-glow lit up the sky, and coloured the motionless water of the harbour. A big bell boomed a monotonous summons to afternoon service, and people began to leave the pier. Those who had secured the entrÉe of the St. George’s Yacht Club proceeded comfortably thither for tea, and Lambert felt that he would have given untold sums for the right to take Francie in under the pillared portico, leaving Tommy Whitty and his seedy black coat in outer darkness. The party was gloomily tending towards the station, when the happy idea occurred to Mr. Lambert of having tea at the Marine Hotel; it might not have the distinction of the club, but it would at all events give him the power of shaking off that damned presuming counter-jumper, as in his own mind he furiously designated Mr. Whitty.

“I’m going to take you up to the hotel for tea, Francie,” he said decisively, and turned at once towards the gate of the Marine gardens. “Good evening, Whitty.”

The look that accompanied this valedictory remark was so conclusive that the discarded Tommy could do no more than accept the position. Francie would not come to his help, being indeed thankful to get rid of him, and he could only stand and look after the two figures, and detest Mr. Lambert with every fibre of his little heart. The coffee-room at the hotel was warm and quiet, and Francie sank thankfully into an armchair by the fire.

“I declare this is the nicest thing I’ve done to-day,” she said, with a sigh of tired ease; “I was dead sick of walking up and down that old pier.”

This piece of truckling was almost too flagrant, and Lambert would not even look at her as he answered,

“I thought you seemed to be enjoying yourself, or I’d have come away sooner.”

Francie felt none of the amusement that she would once have derived from seeing Mr. Lambert in a bad temper; he had stepped into the foreground of her life and was becoming a large and serious object there, too important and powerful to be teased with any degree of pertinacity.

“Enjoy myself!” she exclaimed, “I was thinking all the time that my boots would be cut to pieces with the horrid gravel; and,” she continued, laying her head on the plush-covered back of her chair, and directing a laughing, propitiatory glance at her companion, “you know I had to talk twice as much to poor Tommy because you wouldn’t say a word to him. Besides, I knew him long before I knew you.”

“Oh, of course if you don’t mind being seen with a fellow that looks like a tailor’s apprentice, I have nothing to say against it,” replied Lambert, looking down on her, as he stood fingering his moustache, with one elbow on the chimney-piece. His eyes could not remain implacable when they dwelt on the face that was upturned to him, especially now, when he felt both in face and manner something of pathos and gentleness that was as new as it was intoxicating.

If he had known what it was that had changed her he might have been differently affected by it; as it was, he put it down to the wretchedness of life at Albatross Villa, and was glad of the adversity that was making things so much easier for him. His sulkiness melted away in spite of him; it was hard to be sulky, with Francie all to himself, pouring out his tea and talking to him with an intimateness that was just tipped with flirtation; in fact, as the moments slipped by, and the thought gripped him that the next day would find him alone at Rosemount, every instant of this last afternoon in her society became unspeakably precious. The tÊte-À-tÊte across the tea-table prolonged itself so engrossingly that Lambert forgot his wonted punctuality, and their attempt to catch the five o’clock train for Bray resulted in bringing them breathless to the station as their train steamed out of it.