20 The Real Charlotte. 



(whence her title), and of Carroty Peg, his wife, was a per- 

 son with whom few would have cared to co-operate against 

 her will. On this morning she wore a more ferocious aspect 

 than usual. Her roughly-waving hair, which had never 

 known the dignity of a cap, was bound up in a blue duster, 

 leaving her bony forehead bare ; dust and turf-ashes hung 

 in her grizzled eyebrows, her arms were smeared with black- 

 lead, and the skirt of her dress was girt about her waist, 

 displaying a petticoat of heavy Gal way flannel, long thin 

 legs, and enormous feet cased in countrymen's laced boots. 

 It was fifteen years now, Norry reflected, while she scrubbed 

 the floor and scraped the candle drippings off it with her 

 nails, since Miss Charlotte and the cats had come into the 

 house, and since then the spare room had never had a 

 visitor in it. Nobody had stayed in the house in all those 

 years except little Miss Francie, and for her the cot had 

 been made up in her great-aunt's room ; the old high-sided 

 cot in which her grandmother had slept when she was a 

 child. The cot had long since migrated into the spare 

 room, and from it Norry had just ejected the household 

 effects of Mrs. Bruff and her family, with a pleasure that 

 was mitigated only by the thought that Miss Francie was a 

 young woman now, and would be likely to give a good deal 

 more trouble in the house than even in the days when she 

 stole the cockatoo's sopped toast for her private consump- 

 tion, and christened the tom-cat Susan against everyone's 

 wishes except her great-aunt's. 



Norry and the cockatoo were now the only survivors of 

 the old regime at Tally Ho Lodge, in fact the cockatoo was 

 regarded in Lismoyle as an almost prehistoric relic, dating, 

 at the lowest computation, from the days when old Mrs. 

 Mullen's fox-hunting father had lived there, and given the 

 place the name that was so remarkably unsuited to its sub- 

 sequent career. The cockatoo was a sprightly creature of 

 some twenty shrieking summers on the day that the two 

 Miss Butlers, clad in high-waisted, low-necked gowns, were 

 armed past his perch in the hall by their father, and before, 

 as it seemed to the cockatoo, he had more than half-finished 

 his morning doze, they were back again, this time on the 

 arms of the two young men who, during the previous five 

 months, had done so much to spoil his digestion by pro- 



