igo The Real Charlotte, 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



It was a cold east-windy morning near the middle of 

 March, when the roads were white and dusty, and the 

 clouds were grey, and Miss Mullen, seated in her new 

 dining-room at Gurthnamuckla, was finishing her Saturday 

 balancing of accounts. Now that she had become a landed 

 proprietor, the process was more complicated than it used 

 to be. A dairy, pigs, and poultry cannot be managed and 

 made to pay without thought and trouble, and, as Charlotte 

 had every intention of making Gurthnamuckla pay, she 

 spared neither time nor account books, and was beginning 

 to be well satisfied with the result. She had laid out a good 

 deal of money on the house and farm, but she was going to 

 get a good return for it, or know the reason why ; and as no 

 tub of skim milk was given to the pigs, or barrow of turnips 

 to the cows, without her knowledge, the chances of success 

 seemed on her side. 



She had just entered, on the page headed Receipts, the sale 

 of two pigs at the fair, and surveyed the growing amount, 

 in its neat figures with complacency ; then, laying down her 

 pen, she went to the window, and directed a sharp eye at the 

 two men who were spreading gravel on the reclaimed avenue, 

 and straightening the edges of the grass. 



*"Pon my word, it's beginning to look like a gentleman's 

 avenue," she said to herself, eyeing approvingly the arch of 

 the elm tree branches, and the clumps ot yellow daffodils, 

 the only spots of light in the colourless landscape, while the 

 cawing of the building rooks had a pleasant manorial sound 

 in her ears. A young horse came galloping across the lawn, 

 with floating mane and tail, and an intention to jump the 

 new wooden railings that only failed him at the last moment, 

 and resulted in two soapy slides in the grass, that Charlotte 

 viewed from her window with wonderful equanimity. " I'll 

 give Roddy a fine blowing up when he comes over," she 

 thought, as she watched the colt cutting capers among the 

 daffodils; "I'll ask him it he'd like me to have his four 

 precious colts in to tea. He's as bad about them as I am 

 about the cats ! ' Miss Mullen's expression denoted that 

 the reproof would not be of the character to which Louisa 



