The Real Charlotte. 141 



back of Kingstown pier and listened to the band playing 

 " Dorothy," or " The Lost Chord," in the dark of the 

 summer evening ; but these mmor murmurings, that seemed 

 to pass by steep and painful chromatic paths from one woe 

 to another, were to her merely exercises of varying difficulty 

 and ugliness, in which Miss Dysart never seemed to get the 

 chords quite right. She was too shy to get up and search 

 for amusement among the books and papers upon a remote 

 table, and accordingly she lay back in her chair and regarded 

 Lady Dysart and Miss Hope-Drummond, both comfortably 

 absorbed in conversation, and wondered whether she 

 should ever have money enough to buy herself a tea- 

 gown. 



The door opened, and Christopher sauntered in"; he 

 looked round the room through his eye-glass^ and then 

 wandered towards the piano, where he sat down beside 

 Pamela. Francie viewed this proceeding with less resent- 

 ment than if he had been any other man in the world ; she 

 did not so much mind a neglect in which Miss Hope- 

 Drummond was equally involved, and she was rather fright- 

 ened than otherwise, when soon afterwards she saw him, in 

 evident obedience to a hint from his sister, get up and come 

 towards her with a large photograph-book under his arm. 

 He sat down beside her, and, with what Pamela, watching 

 from the distant piano, felt to be touching docihty, began to 

 expound its contents to her. He had done this thing so 

 often before^ and he knew, or thought he knew so well what 

 people were going to say, that nothing but the unfailing 

 proprietary interest in his own handiwork supported him on 

 these occasions. He had not, however, turned many pages 

 before he found that Francie's comments were by no means 

 of the ordinary tepid and perfunctory sort. The Oxford 

 chapels were, it is true, surveyed by her in anxious silence ; 

 but a crowd of undergraduates leaning over a bridge to look 

 at an eight — an instantaneous photograph of a bump-race, 

 with its running accompaniment of maniacs on the bank — 

 Christopher's room, with Dinah sitting in his armchair with 

 a pipe in her mouth — were all examined and discussed with 

 fervid interest, and a cry of unfeigned excitement greeted 

 the page on which his own photography made its delmi with 

 a deep-brown portrait of Pamela. 



