88 The Real Charlotte, 



CHAPTER XIII. 



Innishochery Island lay on the water like a great green 

 bouquet, with a narrow grey lace edging of stony beach. 

 From the lake it seemed that the foliage stood in a solid 

 impenetrable mass, and that nothing but the innumerable 

 wood-pigeons could hope to gain its inner recesses ; even 

 the space of grass which, at the side of the landing-place, 

 drove a slender wedge up among the trees, had still the 

 moss-grown stumps upon it that told it had been recovered 

 by force from the possession of the tall pines and thick 

 hazel and birch scrub. The end of the wedge narrowed 

 into a thread of a path which wound its briary way among 

 the trees with such sinuous vagueness, and such indifference 

 to branches overhead and rocks underfoot, that to follow it 

 was both an act of faith and a penance. Near the middle 

 of the island it was interrupted by a brook that slipped 

 along whispering to itself through the silence of the wood, 

 and though the path made a poor shift to maintain its con- 

 tinuity with stepping-stones, it expired a few paces farther 

 on in the bracken of a little glade. 



It was a glade that had in some elfish way acquired an 

 expression of extremest old age. The moss grew deep in 

 the grass, lay deep on the rocks ; stunted birch-trees en- 

 circled it with pale twisted arms hoary with lichen, and, at 

 the farther end of it, a grey ruined chapel, standing over the 

 pool that was the birthplace of the stream, fulfilled the last 

 requirement of romance. On this hot summer afternoon 

 the glade had more than ever its air of tranced meditation 

 upon other days and superiority to the outer world, lulled in 

 its sovereignty of the island by the monotone of humming 

 insects, while on the topmost stone of the chapel a magpie 

 gabbled and cackled like a court jester. Christopher 

 thought, as he sat by the pool smoking a cigarette, that he 

 had done well in staying behind under the pretence of 

 photographing the yacht from the landing-place, and thus 

 eluding the rest of the party. He was only intermittently 

 unsociable, but he had always had a taste for his own 

 society, and, as he said to himself, he had been going strong 

 all the morning, and the time had come for solitude and 

 tobacco. 



