6o TJie Real Charlotte. 



into the house, and if you try to stop them they'd claw the 

 face off you ! Oh, they're terrors ! " 



" It's very good of you to tell me all this in time," 

 Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was 

 listening to Miss Mullen's voice, and realising, for the first 

 time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her 

 and her cats ; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted 

 and happy. " Perhaps, on the whole, I'd better stay 

 away ? " he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden 

 causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are 

 arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of 

 life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that 

 would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been per- 

 fectly simple. 



" Ah ! don't say you won't come and take the cats ! " 

 Francie exclaimed. 



They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the 

 others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte 

 looked over her shoulder with a benign smile. 



*' What's this I hear about taking my cats?" she said 

 jovially. " You're welcome to everything in my house, Mr. 

 Dysart, but I'll set the police on you if you take my poor 

 cats!" 



'• Oh, but I assure you — " 



'*He's only going to photo them," said Christopher and 

 Francie together. 



" Do you hear them. Miss Dysart ? " continued Charlotte, 

 fumbUng for her latch key, " conspiring together to rob a 

 poor lone woman of her only live stock ! " 



She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall 

 they caught a glance of Susan's large, stern countenance 

 regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the 

 rails of the staircase. 



" My beauty-boy 1 " shouted his mistress, as he vanished 

 upstairs. " Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart ! " 



Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested 

 than is usual in polite society. When she had left the 

 hammock, slung in the shade beside the tennis-ground at 

 Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran's hymn-book ; 

 still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho 

 between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regarded 



