ZS^ The Real Charlotte. 



CHAPTER XLVIII. 



The question, ten days afterwards, to anyone who had 

 known all the features of the case, would have been whether 

 Francie was worth Christopher's act of championing. 



At the back of the Rosemount kitchen-garden the ground 

 rose steeply into a knoll of respectable height, where grew 

 a tangle of lilac bushes, rhododendrons, seringas, and yellow 

 broom. A gravel path wound ingratiatingly up through 

 these, in curves artfully devised by Mr. Lambert to make 

 the most of the extent and the least of the hill, and near 

 the top a garden-seat was sunk in the bank, with laurels 

 shutting it in on each side, and a laburnum " showering 

 golden tears " above it. Through the perfumed screen of 

 the lilac bushes in front unromantic glimpses of the roof of 

 the house were obtainable — eyesores to Mr. Lambert, who 

 had concentrated all his energies on hiding everything 

 nearer than the semi-circle of lake and distant mountain 

 held in an opening cut through the rhododendrons at the 

 corner of the little plateau on which the seat stood. With- 

 out the disturbance of middle distance the eye lay at ease 

 on the far-oif struggle of the Connemara mountains, and on 

 a serene vista of Lough Moyle ; a view that enticed forth, as 

 to a playground, the wildest and most foolish imaginations, 

 and gave them elbow-room ; a world so large and remote 

 that it needed the sound of wheels on the road to recall the 

 existence of the petty humanities of Lismoyle. 



Francie and Hawkins were sitting there on the afternoon 

 of the day on which Lambert was expected to come home, 

 and as the sun, that had stared in at them through the 

 opening in the rhododendrons when they first went there, 

 slid farther round, their voices sank in unconscious accord 

 with the fading splendours of the afternoon, and their 

 silences seemed momently more difficult to break. They 

 were nearing the end of the phase that had begun in the 

 wood at Bruff, impelled to its verge by the unspoken know- 

 ledge that the last of the unthinking, dangerous days was 

 dying with the sun, and that a final parting was looming up 

 beyond. Neither knew for certain the mind of the other, 

 or how they had dropped into this so-called friendship that 



