The Real Charlotte. 329 



over to lunch to-morrow, and I suppose that's what she was 

 telHng you out in the hall ? Aren't you sorry you didn't 

 marry her instead of me ? " 



Lambert did not answer, but came over to where she was 

 standing, and putting his arm round her, drew her towards 

 him and kissed her with a passion that seemed too serious 

 an answer to her question. She could not know, as she 

 laughed and hid her face from him, that he was saying to 

 himself, " Of course he was bound to come and call, he'd 

 have had to do that no matter who she was I " 



CHAPTER XLIV. 



Spring, that year, came delicately in among the Galway 

 hills ; in primroses, in wild bursts of gorse, and in the later 

 snow of hawthorn, unbeaten by the rain or the wet west 

 wind of rougher seasons. A cuckoo had dropped out of 

 space into the copse at the back of Gurthnamuckla, and 

 kept calhng there with a lusty sweetness ; a mist of green 

 was breathed upon the trees, and in the meadows by the 

 lake a corncrake was adding a diffident guttural or two to 

 the chirruping chorus of coots and moorhens. Mr. Lambert's 

 three-year-olds grew and flourished on the young rich grass, 

 and, in the turbulence of their joie de vivre, hunted the 

 lambs, and bit the calves, and jumped every barrier that the 

 ingenuity of Miss Mullen's herdsman could devise. " Those 

 brutes must be put into the Stone Field," the lady of the 

 house had said, regarding their gambols with a sour eye ; 

 " I don't care whether the grass is good or bad, they'll have 

 to do with it ; " and when she and her guests went forth 

 after their lunch to inspect the farm in general and the 

 young horses in particular, it was to the Stone Field that 

 they first bent their steps. 



No one who has the idea of a green-embowered English 

 lane can hope to realise the fortified alley that wound through 

 the heart of the pastures of Gurthnamuckla, and was known 

 as the Farm Lane. It was scarcely wide enough for two 

 people to walk abreast ; loose stone walls, of four or five 

 feet in thickness, towered on either side of it as high as the 

 head of a tall man ; to meet a cow in it involved either re- 



