234 ^^^^ Real Charlotte. 



ceaseless escape. Nothing now could place him where he 

 had been before, nor could he wish to regain that purpose- 

 less content. It was better to look things in the face at 

 last, and see where they were going to end. It was better 

 to know himself to be Charlotte's prize than to give up 

 Francie. 



This was what it meant, he said to himself, while he 

 changed his funeral garb, and tried to get into step with the 

 interrupted march of the morning. The alternative had 

 been with him for four days, and now, while he wrote his 

 letters, and sat at luncheon, and collected the books that 

 were to interpose between Miss Mullen and her grief, the 

 choice became more despotic than ever, in spite of the 

 antagonism that met it in every surrounding. All the 

 chivalry that smouldered under the modern malady of 

 exhausted enthusiasm ranged itself on Francie's side ; all 

 the poetry in which he had steeped his mind, all his own 

 poetic fancy, combined to bhnd him to many things that he 

 would otherwise have seen. He acquitted her of any share 

 in her cousin's coarse scheming with a passionateness that 

 in itself testified to the terror lest it might be true. He 

 had idealised her to the pitch that might have been ex- 

 pected, and clothed her with his own refinement, as with a 

 garment, so that it was her position that hurt him most, her 

 embarrassment that shamed him beyond his own. 



Christopher's character is easier to feel than to describe ; 

 so conscious of its own weakness as to be almost incapable 

 of confident effort, and with a soul so humble and straight- 

 forward that it did not know its own strength and simplicity. 

 Some dim understanding of him must have reached Francie, 

 with her ignorant sentimentalities and her Dublin brogue ; 

 and as a sea-weed stretches vague arms up towards the 

 light through the conflict of the tides, her pliant soul rose 

 through its inherited vulgarities, and gained some vision of 

 higher things. Christopher could not know how un- 

 paralleled a person he was in her existence, of how wholly 

 unknown a type. Hawkins and he had been stars of un- 

 imagined magnitude ; but though she had attained to the 

 former's sphere with scarcely an effort, Christopher re- 

 mained infinitely remote. She could scarcely have believed 

 that as he drove from Bruff in the quiet sunshine of the 



