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and all.”

      “I tell you the house isn’t in such a bad way as you think; it’s dirt ails it more than anything else.” Charlotte had recovered her wonted energy of utterance. “Believe me, if I had a few workmen in that house for a month you wouldn’t know it.”

      “Well, I believe you will, sooner or later. All the same, I can’t see what the deuce you want with it. Now, if I had the place, I’d make a pot of money out of it, keeping young horses there, as I’ve often told you. I’d do a bit of coping, and making hunters to sell. There’s no work on earth I’d like as well.”

      He took a long pull at his cigar, and expelled a sigh and a puff of smoke.

      “Well, Roddy,” said Charlotte, after a moment’s pause, speaking with an unusual slowness and almost hesitancy, “you know I wouldn’t like to come between you and your fancy. If you want the farm, in God’s name take it yourself!”

      “Take it myself! I haven’t the money to pay the fine, much less to stock it. I tell you what, Charlotte,” he went on, turning round and putting his hand on the splash-board of the phaeton as he walked, “you and I are old pals, and I don’t mind telling you it’s the most I can do to keep going the way I am now. I never was so driven for money in my life,” he ended, some vague purpose, added to the habit of an earlier part of his life, pushing him on to be confidential.

      “Who’s driving you, Roddy?” said Charlotte, in a voice in which a less preoccupied person than her companion might have noticed a curiously gentle inflection.

      It is perhaps noteworthy that while Mr. Lambert’s lips replied with heartfelt irritation, “Oh, they’re all at me, Langford the coachbuilder, and everyone of them,” one section of his brain was asking the other how much ready money old Mrs. Mullen had had to leave, and was receiving a satisfactory answer.

      There was a pause in the conversation. It was so long now since the black horse had felt the whip, that, acting on the presumption that his mistress had fallen asleep, he fell into an even more slumbrous crawl without any notice being taken.

      “Roddy,” said Charlotte at last, and Lambert now observed how low and rough her voice was, “do you remember in old times once or twice, when you were put to it for a five-pound note, you made no bones about asking a friend to help you? Well, you know I’m a poor woman”—even at this moment Charlotte’s caution asserted itself—“but I daresay I could put my hand on a couple of hundred, and if they’d be any use to you—”

      Lambert became very red. The possibility of some such a climax as this had floated in a sub-current of thought just below the level of formed ideas, but now that it had come, it startled him. It was an unheard-of thing that Charlotte should make such an offer as this. It gave him suddenly a tingling sense of power, and at the same time a strange instinct of disgust and shame.

      “Oh, my dear Charlotte,” he began awkwardly, “upon my soul you’re a great deal too good. I never thought of such a thing—I—I—” he stammered, wishing he could refuse, but casting about for words in which to accept.

      “Ah, nonsense. Now, Roddy, me dear boy,” interrupted Charlotte, regaining her usual manner as she saw his embarrassment, “say no more about it. We’ll consider it a settled thing, and we’ll go through the base business details after tea.”

      Lambert said to himself that there was really no way out of it. If she was so determined the only thing was to let her do as she liked; no one could say that the affair was of his seeking.

      “And, you know,” continued Charlotte in her most jocular voice, before he could frame a sentence of the right sort, “who knows, if I get the farm, that we mightn’t make a joint-stock business out of it, and have young horses there, and all the rest of it!”

      “You’re awfully good, Charlotte,” said Lambert, with an emotion in his voice that she did not guess to be purely the result of inward relief and exultation; “I’m awfully obliged to you—you always were a—a true friend—some day, perhaps, I’ll be able to show you what I think about it,” he stammered, unable to think of anything else to say, and, lifting his hand from the splash-board, he put it on hers, that lay in her lap with the reins in it, and pressed it for a moment. Into both their minds shot simultaneously the remembrance of a somewhat similar scene, when, long ago, Charlotte had come to the help of her father’s pupil, and he had expressed his gratitude in a more ardent manner—a manner that had seemed cheap enough to him at the time, but that had been more costly to Charlotte than any other thing that had ever befallen her.

      “You haven’t forgotten old times any more than I have,” he went on, knowing very well that he was taking now much the same simple and tempting method of getting rid of his obligation that he had once found so efficacious, and to a certain extent enjoying the thought that he could still make a fool of her. “Ah, well!” he sighed, “there’s no use trying to get those times back, any more than there is in trying to forget them.” He hesitated. “But, after all, there’s many a new tune played on an old fiddle! Isn’t that so?” He was almost frightened at his own daring as he saw Charlotte’s cheek burn with a furious red, and her lips quiver in the attempt to answer.

      Upon their silence there broke from the distance a loud scream, then another, and then a burst of laughter in a duet of soprano and bass, coming apparently from a lane that led into the road a little further on—a smooth and secluded little lane, bordered thickly with hazel bushes—a private road, in fact, to a model farm that Mr. Lambert had established on his employer’s property. From the mouth of this there broke suddenly a whirling vision of whiteness and wheels, and Miss Fitzpatrick, mounted on a tricycle and shrieking loudly, dashed across the high road and collapsed in a heap in the ditch. Lambert started forward, but long before he could reach her the Rev. Joseph Corkran emerged at full speed from the lane, hatless, with long flying coat-tails, and, with a skill born of experience, extricated Francie from her difficulties.

      “Oh, I’m dead!” she panted. “Oh, the horrible thing! What good were you that you let it go?” unworthily attacking the equally exhausted Corkran. Then, in tones of consternation, “Goodness! Look at Mr. Lambert and Charlotte! Oh, Mr. Lambert,” as Lambert came up to her, “did you see the toss I got? The dirty thing ran away with me down the hill, and Mr. Corkran was so tired running he had to let go, and I declare I thought I was killed—and you don’t look a bit sorry for me!”

      “Well, what business had you to get up on a thing like that?” answered Lambert, looking angrily at the curate. “I wonder, Corkran, you hadn’t more sense than to let a lady ride that machine.”

      “Well, indeed, Mr. Lambert, I told Miss Fitzpatrick it wasn’t as easy as she thought,” replied the guilty Corkran, a callow youth from Trinity College, Dublin, who had been as wax in Francie’s hands, and who now saw, with unfeigned terror, the approach of Charlotte. “I begged of her not to go outside Tally Ho, but—but—I think I’d better go back and look for my hat”—he ended abruptly, retreating into the lane just as Charlotte drew up the black horse and opened her mouth to deliver herself of her indignation.

CHAPTER XII.

       Table of Contents

      The broad limestone steps at Bruff looked across the lawn to the lake, and to the south. They were flanked on either hand by stone balustrades which began and ended in a pot of blazing scarlet geraniums, and on their topmost plateau on this brilliant 1st of July, the four Bruff dogs sat on their haunches and gazed with anxious despondency in at the open hall-door. For the last half-hour Max and Dinah, the indoor dogs, had known that an expedition was toward. They had seen Pamela put on a hat that certainly was not her garden one, and as certainly lacked the veil that betokened the abhorred ceremony of church-going. They knew this hat well, and at the worst it usually meant a choir practice; but taken in connection with a blue serge skirt and the packing of a luncheon basket, they almost ventured to hope it portended a picnic on the lake. They adored picnics. In the first

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