292 The Real Charlotte. 



she had never liked Tally Ho. There was a strain of 

 superstition in her that, like her love of land, showed 

 how strongly the blood of the Irish peasant ran in her veins; 

 since she had turned Francie out of the house she had 

 not liked to think of the empty room facing her own, in 

 which Mrs. Mullen's feeble voice had laid upon her the 

 charge that she had not kept ; her dealings with table-turning 

 and spirit-writing had expanded for her the boundaries of the 

 possible, and made her the more accessible to terror of the 

 supernatural. Here, at Gurthnamuckla, there was nothing 

 to harbour these suggestions ; no brooding evergreens rust- 

 ling outside her bedroom window, no rooms ahve with the 

 little incidents of a past life, no doors whose opening and 

 shuttmg were like familiar voices reminding her of the foot- 

 steps that they had once heralded. This new house was 

 peopled only by the pleasant phantoms of a future that she 

 had fashioned for herself out of the slightest and vulgarest 

 materials, and her wakeful nights were spent in schemings 

 in which the romantic and the practical were logically 

 blended. 



Norry the Boat did not, as has been hinted, share her 

 mistress's satisfaction in Gurthnamuckla. For four months 

 she had reigned in its kitchen, and it found no more favour 

 in her eyes than on the day when she, with her roasting-jack 

 in one hand and the cockatoo's cage in the other, had made 

 her official entry into it. It was not so much the new 

 range, or the barren tidyness of the freshly-painted cup- 

 boards ; these things had doubtless been at first very 

 distressing. But time had stored the cupboards with the 

 miscellanies that Norry loved to hoard, and Bid Sal had 

 imparted a home-like feeling to the range by wrenching the 

 hinge of the oven-door so that it had to be kept closed with 

 the poker. Even the unpleasantly dazzling whitewash was 

 now turning a comfortable yellow brown, and the cobwebs 

 were growing about the hooks in the ceiling. But none of 

 these things thoroughly consoled Norry. Her complaints, 

 it is true, did not seem adequate to account for her general 

 aspect of discontent. Miss Mullen heard daily lamentations 

 over the ravages committed by Mr. Lambert's young horses 

 on the clothes bleaching on the furze-bushes, the loss of 

 "the clever little shcullery that we had in Tally Ho," and 



