340 The Real Charlotte. 



" Oh, I see you are too grand to answer me ; I suppose 

 it's because I'm only your husband that you think I'm not 

 worth talking to." He gave the horse a lash of the whip, 

 and then chucked up its head as it sprang forward, making 

 the trap rock and jerk. The hateful satisfaction of taunt- 

 ing her about Hawkins was beginning to die in him like 

 drunkenness, and he dimly saw what it was going to cost 

 him. " You make me say these sort of things to you," he 

 broke out, seeing that she would not speak. " How can I 

 help it, when you treat me like the dirt under your feet, and 

 fight with me if I say a word to you that you don't Hke ? 

 I'd Hke to see the man that would stand it ! " 



He looked down at her, and saw her head drooping for- 

 ward, and her hand up to her face. He could not say more, 

 as at that moment Mary Holloran was holding the gate open 

 for him to drive in ; and as he lifted his wife out of the trap 

 at the hall door, and saw the tears that she could no longer 

 hide from him, he knew that his punishment had begun, and 

 the iron entered into his soul. 



CHAPTER XLVI. 



A FEW days afterwards Lambert started on his rent-collect- 

 ing tour. Peace of a certain sort was restored, complete in 

 outward seeming, but with a hidden flaw that both knew and 

 pretended to ignore. When Lambert sat by himself in the 

 smoking-carriage of the morning train from Lismoyle, with 

 the cold comfort of a farewell kiss still present with him, he 

 was as miserable and anxious a man as could easily have 

 been found. Charlotte had arrived the night before, and 

 with all her agreeability had contrived to remind him that 

 she expected a couple of hundred pounds on his return. 

 He could never have beUeved that she would have dunned 

 him in this way, and the idea occurred to him for the first 

 time that she was perhaps taking this method of paying him 

 out for what, in her ridiculous vanity, she might have ima- 

 gined to be his bad treatment of her. But none the less, it 

 was a comfort to him to think that she was at his house. 

 He did not say so to himself, but he knew that he could not 

 have found a better spy. 



