56 The Real Charlotte, 



been weeding, approached the scene of her mother's 

 labours. 



" Mamma," she said faintly, "you have planted the whole 

 bed with chickweed ! " 



CHAPTER IX. 



It had been hard work pulling the punt across from Bruff 

 to Lismoyle with two well-grown young women sitting in the 

 stern ; it had been a hot walk up from the landing-place to 

 the church, but worse than these, transcendently worse, in 

 that it involved the suffering of the mind as well as the body, 

 was the choir practice. Christopher's long nose drooped 

 despondingly over his Irish church hymnal, and his long 

 back had a disconsolate hoop in it as he leaned it against 

 the wall in his place in the backmost row of the choir 

 benches. The chants had been long and wearisome, and 

 the hymns were proving themselves equally enduring. 

 Christopher was not eminently musical or conspicuously 

 religious, and he regarded with a kind of dismal respect and 

 surprise the fervour in Pamela's pure profile as she turned 

 to Mrs. Gascogne and suggested that the hymn they had 

 just gone through twice should be sung over again. He 

 supposed it was because she had High Church tendencies 

 that she was able to stand this sort of thing, and his mind 

 drifted into abstract speculations as to how people could be 

 as good as Pamela was and live. 



In the interval before the last hymn he derived a tempor- 

 ary solace from finding his own name inscribed in dull red 

 characters in the leaf of his hymn-book, with, underneath in 

 the same colour, the fateful inscription, " Written in blood 

 by Garrett Dysart," The thought of his younger brother 

 utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the 

 archdeacon's sermon, had for the moment inspired Christo- 

 pher with a sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed 

 into his pristine gloom. He knew the hymn perfectly well 

 by this time, and his inoffensive tenor joined mechanically 

 with the other voices, while his eyes roamed idly over the 

 two rows of people in front of him. There was nothing 

 suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela's neighbours. 



