The Real Charlotte. 53 



the rose, miss," he continued, with a flourish of his hand ; 

 " sweets to the sweet ! " 



Sir Benjamin aimed a backward stroke with his oak stick 

 at his attendant, a stroke in which long practice had failed 

 to make him perfect, and in the exchange of further ameni- 

 ties the party passed out of sight. This was not Miss Hope- 

 Drummond's first meeting with her host. His bath-chair 

 had daily, as it seemed to her, lain in wait in the shrubberies, 

 to cause terror to the solitary, and discomfiture to tete-a- 

 tetes ; and on one morning he had stealthily protruded the 

 crook of his stick from the door of his room as she went by, 

 and all but hooked her round the ankle with it. 



*' Really, it is disgraceful that he is not locked up," she 

 said to herself crossly, as she gathered the contested bud, 

 and sat down to write letters ; " but in Ireland no one seems 

 to think anything of anything ! " 



It was very hot down in the garden where Lady Dysart 

 and Pamela were at work ; Lady Dysart kneeling in the in- 

 adequate shade of a parasol, whose handle she had propped 

 among the pans in the wheelbarrow, and Pamela weeding a 

 flower-bed a few yards away. It was altogether a scene 

 worthy in its domestic simplicity of the Fairchild Family, 

 only that instead of Mr. Fairchild, " stretched on the grass 

 at a little distance with his book," a bronze-coloured dach- 

 shund lay roasting his long side in the sun ; and also that 

 Lady Dysart, having mistaken the young chickweed in a 

 seedling pan for the asters that should have been there, was 

 filling her bed symmetrically with the former, an imbeciHty 

 that Mrs. Sherwood would never have permitted in a parent. 

 The mother and daughter lifted their heads at the sound of 

 the conflict on the terrace. 



" Papa will frighten Evelyn into a fit," observed Pamela, 

 rubbing a midge off her nose with an earthy gardening glove; 

 " I wish James Canavan could be induced to keep him away 

 from the house." 



" It's all right, dear," said Lady Dysart, panting a little as 

 she straightened her back and surveyed her rows of chick- 

 weed ; " Christopher is with her, and you know he never 

 notices anyone else when Christopher is there." 



Lady Dysart had in her youth married, with a little judi- 

 cious coercion, a man thirty years older than herself, and 



