The Real Charlotte. 319 



yond signing his name a good many times, and trying to be- 

 come accustomed to hearing himself called Sir Christopher; 

 occupations that seemed rather elementary in the construc- 

 tion of a career. His want of initiative energy in every-day 

 matters kept him motionless and apathetic, waiting for his 

 new atmosphere to make itself palpable to him, and pre- 

 pared to resign himself to its conditions. He even, in his 

 unquenchable self-consciousness, knew that it would be 

 wholesome for him if these were such as he least liked ; but 

 in the meantime, he remained passively unsettled, and a 

 letter from Lord Castlemore, in which his tact and con- 

 scientiousness as a secretary were fully set forth, roused no 

 outside ambition in him. He re-read it on a shimmering 

 May morning, with one arm hanging over the tiller of his 

 boat, as she crept with scarcely breathing sails through the 

 pale streaks of calm that lay like dreams upon the lake. 

 He was close under the woods of Bruff, close enough to 

 feel how still and busy they were in the industry of spring. 

 It seemed to him that the sound of the insects was like the 

 humming of her loom, and almost mechanically he turned 

 over the envelope of Lord Castlemore's letter, and began in 

 the old familiar way to scrawl a line or two on the back of 

 it. 



The well-known crest, however, disconcerted his fancy, 

 and he fell again to ruminating upon the letter itself. If 

 this expressed the sum of his abilities, diplomatic life was 

 certainly not worth living. Tact and conscientiousness were 

 qualities that would grace the discharge of a doctor's butler, 

 and might be expected from anyone of the most ordinary 

 intelligence. He could not think that his services to his 

 country, as concentrated in Lord Castlemore, were at all re- 

 markable ; they had given him far less trouble than the 

 most worthless of those efforts in prose and verse, that, as he 

 thought contemptuously, were like the skeletons that mark 

 the desert course of a caravan ; he did not feel the diffi- 

 culty, and he, therefore, thought the achievement small. A 

 toying breeze fluttered the letter in his hand, and the boat 

 tilted languidly in recognition of it. The water began to 

 murmur about the keel, and Christopher presently found 

 himself gliding smoothly towards the middle of the lake. 



He looked across at Lismoyle, spreading placidly along 



