The Real Charlotte. 45 



knew her grandfawther. I am much pleased to make her 

 acquaintance." 



She inclined her head as she spoke, and Francie, with 

 much disposition to laugh, bowed hers in return ; each 

 instant Miss Duffy's resemblance, both in feature and cos- 

 tume, to a beggar woman who frequented the corner of 

 Sackville Street, was becoming harder to bear with fortitude, 

 and she was delighted to leave Lambert to his tetea-tete and 

 ride out into the lawn, among the sycamores and hawthorns, 

 where the black mare immediately fell to devouring grass 

 with a resolve that was quite beyond Francie's power to 

 combat. 



She broke a little branch off a low-growing ash tree, to 

 keep away the flies that were doing their best to spoil the 

 pleasure of a perfect afternoon, and sat there, fanning her- 

 self lazily, while the mare, with occasional impatient tugs at 

 the reins and stampings at the flies, cropped her way 

 onwards from one luscious tuft to another. The Lismoyle 

 grazier's cattle had collected themselves under the trees at 

 the farther end of the lawn, where a swampy pool still re- 

 mained of the winter encroachments of the lake. In the 

 sunshine at the other side of the wall, a chain of such pools 

 stretched to the broad blue water, and grey limestone rocks 

 showed above the tangle of hemlock and tall spikes of 

 magenta foxgloves, A white sail stood dazzlingly out in the 

 turquoise blue of a band of calm, and the mountains on the 

 farther side of the lake were palely clothed in thinnest 

 lavender and most ethereal green. 



It might have been the unexpected likeness that she 

 had found in Julia Duffy to her old friend the beggar woman 

 that took Francie's thoughts away from this idyll of per- 

 fected summer to the dry, grey Dublin streets that had been 

 her uttermost horizon a week ago. The milkman generally 

 called at the Fitzpatricks' house at about this hour; the 

 clank of his pint measure against the area railings, even his 

 pleasantries with Maggie the cook, relative to his bestowing 

 an extra " sup for the cat," were suddenly and sharply pre- 

 sent with her. The younger Fitzpatrick children would be 

 home from school, and would be raging through the kitchen 

 seeking what they might devour in the interval before the 

 six o'clock dinner, and she herself would probably have been 



