The Real Charlotte Part 24

"Oh, I don't know-I don't care-" moving again restlessly in his chair; "he's such a rotten, cold-blooded devil, you can't tell what he's at." Even at this juncture it gave him pleasure to make little of Christopher to Francie. "He asked me the most beastly questions he could think of, in that d-d stammering way of his. He's to write to me in two or three days, and I know well what he'll say," he went on with a stabbing sigh; "I suppose he'll have it all over the country in a week's time. He's been to the bank and seen the estate account, and that's what's done me. I asked him plump and plain if he hadn't been put up to it, and he didn't deny it, but there's no one could have known what was paid into that account but Baker or one of the clerks, and they knew nothing about the fines-I mean-they couldn't understand enough to tell him anything. But what does it matter who told him. The thing's done now, and I may as well give up."

"What will you do?" said Francie faintly.

"If it wasn't for you I think I'd put a bullet through my head," he answered, his innately vulgar soul prompting him to express the best thought that was in him in conventional heroics, "but I couldn't leave you, Francie-I couldn't leave you-" he broke down again-"it was for our honeymoon I took the most of the money-" He could not go on, and her whole frame was shaken by his sobs.

"Don't, Roddy, don't cry," she murmured, feeling cold and sick.

"He knows I took the money," Lambert went on incoherently; "I'll have to leave the country-I'll sell everything-" he got up and began to walk about the room-"I'll pay him-d.a.m.n him-I'll pay him every farthing. He sha'n't have it to say he was kept waiting for his money! He shall have it this week!"

"But how will you pay him if you haven't the money?" said Francie, with the same lifelessness of voice that had characterised her throughout.

"I'll borrow the money-I'll raise it on the furniture; I'll send the horses up to Sewell's, though G.o.d knows what price I'll get for them this time of year, but I'll manage it somehow. I'll go out to Gurthnamuckla this very afternoon about it. Charlotte's got a head on her shoulders-" He stood still, and the idea of borrowing from Charlotte herself took hold of him. He felt that such trouble as this must command her instant sympathy, and awaken all the warmth of their old friends.h.i.+p, and his mind turned towards her stronger intelligence with a reliance that was creditable to his ideas of the duties of a friend. "I could give her a bill of sale on the horses and furniture," he said to himself.

His eyes rested for the first time on Francie, who had sunk into the chair from which he had risen, and was looking at him as if she did not see him. Her hair was ruffled from lying on his shoulder, and her eyes were wild and fixed, like those of a person who is looking at a far-off spectacle of disaster and grief.

CHAPTER L.

The expected rain had not come, though the air was heavy and damp with the promise of it. It hung unshed, above the thirsty country, looking down gloomily upon the dusty roads, and the soft and straight young gra.s.s in the meadows; waiting for the night, when the wind would moan and cry for it, and the newborn leaves would shudder in the dark at its coming.

At three o'clock Francie was sure that the afternoon would be fine, and soon afterwards she came downstairs in her habit, and went into the drawingroom to wait for the black mare to be brought to the door. She was going to ride towards Gurthnamuckla to meet Lambert, who had gone there some time before; he had made Francie promise to meet him on his way home, and she was going to keep her word. He had become quite a different person to her since the morning, a person who no longer appealed to her admiration or her confidence, but solely and distressingly to her pity. She had always thought of him as invincible, self-sufficing, and possesed of innumerable interests besides herself; she knew him now as dishonest and disgraced, and miserable, stripped of all his pretensions and vanities, but she cared for him to-day more than yesterday. It was against her will that his weakness appealed to her; she would have given worlds for a heart that did not smite her at its claim, but her pride helped out her compa.s.sion. She told herself that she could not let people have it to say that she ran away from Roddy because he was in trouble.

She felt chilly, and she s.h.i.+vered as she stood by the fire, whose unseasonable extravagance daily vexed the righteous soul of Eliza Hackett. Hawkins' note was in her hand, and she read it through twice while she waited; then, as she heard the sound of wheels on the gravel, she tore it in two and threw it into the fire, and, for the second time that morning, ran to the window.

It was Christopher Dysart again. He saw her at the window and took off his cap, and before he had time to ring the bell, she had opened the hall door. She had, he saw at once, been crying, and her paleness, and the tell-tale heaviness of her eyes, contrasted pathetically with the smartness of her figure in her riding habit, and the boyish jauntiness of her hard felt hat.

"Mr. Lambert isn't in, Sir Christopher," she began at once, as if she had made up her mind whom he had come to see; "but won't you come in?"

"Oh-thank you-I-I haven't much time-I merely wanted to speak to your husband," stammered Christopher.

"Oh, please come in," she repeated, "I want to speak to you." Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she turned quickly from him and walked towards the drawing-room.

Christopher followed her with the mien of a criminal. He felt that he would rather have been robbed twenty times over than see the eyes that, in his memory, had always been brilliant and undefeated, avoiding his as if they were afraid of him, and know that he was the autocrat before whom she trembled. She remained standing near the middle of the room, with one hand on the corner of the piano, whose gaudy draperies had, even at this juncture, a painful sub-effect upon Christopher; her other hand fidgeted restlessly with a fold of the habit that she was holding up, and it was evident that whatever her motive had been in bringing him in, her courage was not equal to it. Christopher waited for her to speak, until the silence became unendurable.

"I intended to have been here earlier," he said, saying anything rather than nothing, "but there was a great deal to be got through at the Bench to-day, and I've only just got away. You know I'm a magistrate now, and indifferently minister justice-"

"I'm glad I hadn't gone out when you came," she interrupted, as though, having found a beginning, she could not lose a moment in using it. "I wanted to say that if you-if you'll only give Roddy a week's time he'll pay you. He only meant to borrow the money, like, and he thought he could pay you before; but, indeed, he says he'll pay you in a week." Her voice was low and full of the bitterest humiliation, and Christopher wished that before he had arraigned his victim, and offered him up as an oblation to his half-hearted sense of duty, he had known that his infirmity of purpose would have brought him back three hours afterwards to offer the culprit a way out of his difficulties. It would have saved him from his present hateful position, and what it would have saved her was so evident, that he turned his head aways he spoke, rather than look at her.

"I came back to tell your husband that-that he could arrange things in-in some such way," he said, as guiltily and awkwardly as a boy. "I'm. sorry- more sorry than I can say-that he should have spoken to you about it. Of course, that was my fault. I should have told him then what I came to tell him now."

"He's gone out now to see about selling his horses and the furniture," went on Francie, scarcely realising all of Christopher's leniency in her desire to prove Lambert's severe purity of action. Her mind was not capable of more than one idea-one, that is, in addition to the question that had monopolised it since yesterday afternoon, and Christopher's method of expressing himself had never been easily understood by her.

"Oh, he mustn't think of doing that!" exclaimed Christopher, horrified that she should think him a Shylock, demanding so extreme a measure of rest.i.tution; "it wasn't the actual money question that- that we disagreed about; he can take as long as he likes about repaying me. In fact-in fact you can tell him from me that-he said something this morning about giving up the agency. Well, I-I should be glad if he would keep it."

He had stultified himself now effectually; he knew that he had acted like a fool, and he felt quite sure that Mr. Lambert's sense of grat.i.tude would not prevent his holding the same opinion. He even foresaw Lambert's complacent a.s.sumption that Francie had talked him over, but he could not help himself. The abstract justice of allowing the innocent to suffer with the guilty was beyond him; he forgot to theorise, and acted on instinct as simply as a savage. She also had acted on instinct. When she called him in she had nerved herself to ask for reprieve, but she never hoped for forgivenness, and as his intention penetrated the egotism of suffering, the thought leaped with it that, if Roddy were to be let off, everything would be on the same footing that it had been yesterday evening. A blush that was incomprehensible to Christopher swept over her face; the grasp of circ.u.mstances relaxed somewhat, and a jangle of unexplainable feelings confused what self-control she had left.

"You're awfully good," she began half hysterically. "I always knew you were good; I wish Roddy was like you! Oh, I wish I was like you! I can't help it-I can't help crying; you were always too good to me, and I never was worth it!" She sat down on one of the high stiff chairs, for which her predecessor had worked beaded seats, and hid her eyes in her handkerchief. "Please don't talk to me; please don't say anything to me-" She stopped suddenly. "What's that? Is that anyone riding up?"

"No. It's your horse coming round from the yard," said Christopher, taking a step towards the window, and trying to keep up the farce of talking as if nothing had happened.

"My horse!" she exclaimed, starting up. "Oh, yes, I must go and meet Roddy. I mustn't wait any longer." She began, as if unconscious of Christopher's presence, to look for the whip and gloves that she had laid down. He saw them before she did and handed them to her.

"Good-bye," he said, taking her cold, trembling hand, "I must go too. You will tell your husband that it's-it's all right."

"Yes. I'll tell him. I'm going to meet him. I must start now," she answered, scarcely seeming to notice what he said, and withdrawing her hand from his, she began hurriedly to b.u.t.ton on her gloves.

Christopher did not wait for further dismissal, but when his hand was on the door, her old self suddenly woke.

"Look at me letting you go away without telling you a bit how grateful I am to you!" she said, with a lift of her tear-disfigured eyes that was like a changeling of the look he used to know; "but don't you remember what Mrs. Baker said about me, that 'you couldn't expect any manners from a Dublin Jackeen.'"

She laughed weakly, and Christopher stammering more than ever in an attempt to say that there was nothing to be grateful for, got himself out of the room.

After he had gone, Francie gave herself no time to think. Everything was reeling round her as she went out on to the steps, and even Michael, the groom, thought to himself that if he hadn't the trap to wash, he'd put the saddle on the chestnut and folly the misthress, she had that thrimulous way with her when he put the reins into her hands, and only for it was the mare she was riding he wouldn't see her go out by herself. It was the first of June, and the gaiety of the spring was nearly gone. The flowers had fallen from the hawthorn, the bluebells and primroses were vanis.h.i.+ng as quietly as they came, the meadows were already swarthy, and the breaths of air that sent pale s.h.i.+mmers across them, were full of the unspeakable fragrance of the ripening gra.s.s. Under the trees, near Rosemount, the shadowing greenness had saturated the daylight with its gloom, but out among the open pastures and meadows the large grey sky seemed almost bright, and, in the rich sobriety of tone, the red cattle were brilliant spots of colour.

The black mare and her rider were now on thoroughly confidential terms, and, so humiliatingly interwoven are soul and body, as the exercise quickened the blood in her veins, Francie's incorrigible youth rose up, and while it brightened her eyes and drove colour to her cheeks, it whispered that somehow or other happiness might come to her. She rode fast till she reached the turn to Gurthnamuckla, and there, mindful of her husband's injunctions that she was not to ride up to the house, but to wait for him on the road, she relapsed into a walk.

As she slackened her pace, all the thoughts that she had been riding away from came up with her again. What claim had Roddy on her now? She had got him out of his trouble, and that was the most he could expect her to do for him. He hadn't thought much about the trouble he was bringing on her; he never as much as said he was sorry for the disgrace it would be to her. Why should she break her heart for him, and Gerald's heart too?-as she said Hawkins' name to herself, her hands fell into her lap, and she moaned aloud. Every step the mare was taking was carrying her farther from him, but yet she could not turn back. She was changed since yesterday; she had seen her husband's soul laid bare, and it had shown her how tremendous were sin and duty; it had touched her slumbering moral sense as well as her kindness, and though she rebelled she did not dare to turn back.

It was not till she heard a pony's quick gallop behind her, and, looking back, saw Hawkins riding after her at full speed, that she knew how soon she was to be tested. She had scarcely time to collect herself before he was pulling up the pony beside her, and had turned a flushed and angry face towards her.

"Didn't you get my note? Didn't you know I was coming?" he began in hot remonstrance. Then, seeing in a moment how ill and strange she looked, "What's the matter? Has anything happened?"

"Roddy came home yesterday evening," she said, with her eyes fixed on the mare's mane.

"Well, I know that," interrupted Hawkins. "Do you mean that he was angry? Did he find out anything about me? If he did see the note I wrote you, there was nothing in that." Francie shook her head. "Then it's nothing? It's only that you've been frightened by that brute," he said, kicking his pony up beside the mare, and trying to look into Francie's downcast eyes. "Don't mind him. It won't be for long."

"You mustn't say that," she said hurriedly. "I was very wrong yesterday, and I'm sorry for it now."

"I know you're not!" he burst out, with all the conviction that he felt. "You can't unsay what you said to me yesterday. I sat up the whole night thinking the thing over and thinking of you, and at last I thought of a fellow I know out in New Zealand, who told me last year I ought to chuck the army and go out there." He dropped his reins on the pony's neck, and took Francie's hand. "Why shouldn't we go there together, Francie? I'll give up everything for you, my darling!"

She feebly tried to take her hand away, but did not reply.

"I've got three hundred a year of my own, and we can do ourselves awfully well on that out there. We'll always have lots of horses, and it's a ripping climate-and-and I love you, and I'll always love you!"

He was carried away by his own words, and, stooping his head, he kissed her hand again and again.

Every pulse in her body answered to his touch, and when she drew her hand away, it was with an effort that was more than physical.

"Ah! stop, stop," she cried. "I've changed-I didn't mean it."

"Didn't mean what?" demanded Hawkins, with his light eyes on fire.

"Oh, leave me alone," she said, turning her distracted face towards him. "I'm nearly out of my mind as it is. What made you follow me out here? I came out so as I wouldn't see you, and I'm going to meet Roddy now."

Hawkins' colour died slowly down to a patchy white. "What do you think it was that made me follow you? Do you want to make me tell you over again what you know already?" She did not answer, and he went on, trying to fight against his own fears by speaking very quietly and rationally. "I don't know what you're at, Francie. I don't believe you know what you're saying. Something must have happened, and it would be fairer to tell me what it is, than to drive me distracted in this sort of way."

There was a pause of several seconds, and he was framing a fresh remonstrance when she spoke.

"Roddy's in great trouble. I wouldn't leave him," she said, taking refuge in a prevarication of the exact truth.

Something about her told Hawkins that things were likely to go hard with him, and there was something, too, that melted his anger as it rose; but her pale face drew him to a height of pa.s.sion that he had not known before.

"And don't you think anything about me?" he said with a breaking voice. "Are you ready to throw me overboard just because he's in trouble, when you know he doesn't care for you a tenth part as much as I do? Do you mean to tell me that you want me to go away, and say good-bye to you for ever? If you do, I'll go, and if you hear I've gone to the devil, you'll know who sent me."

The naive selfishness of this argument was not perceived by either. Hawkins felt his position to be almost n.o.ble, and did not in the least realise what he was asking Francie to sacrifice for him. He had even forgotten the idea that had occurred to him last night, that to go to New Zealand would be a pleasanter way of escaping from his creditors than marrying Miss Coppard. Certainly Francie had no thought of his selfishness or of her own sacrifice. She was giddy with struggle; right and wrong had lost their meaning and changed places elusively; the only things that she saw clearly were the beautiful future that had been offered to her, and the look in Roddy's face when she had told him that wherever he had to go she would go with him.

The horses had moved staidly on, while these two lives stood still and wrestled with their fate, and the summit was slowly reached of the long hill on which Lambert had once pointed out to her the hoof-prints of Hawkins' pony. The white road and the grey rock country stretched out before them, colourless and discouraging under the colourless sky, and Hawkins still waited for his answer. Coming towards them up the tedious slope was a string of half-a-dozen carts, with a few people walking on either side; an unremarkable procession, that might have meant a wedding, or merely a neighbourly return from market, but for a long, yellow coffin that lay, hemmed in between old women, in the midmost cart. Francie felt a superst.i.tious thrill as she saw it; a country funeral, with its barbarous and yet fitting crudity, always seemed to bring death nearer to her than the plumed conventionalities of the hea.r.s.es and mourning coaches that she was accustomed to. She had once been to the funeral of a fellow Sunday-school child in Dublin, and the first verse of the hymn that they had sung then, came back, and began to weave itself in with the beat of the mare's hoofs.

"Brief life is here our portion, Brief sorrow, short-lived care, The life that knows no ending, The tearless life is there."

"Francie, are you ever going to answer me? Come away with me this very day. We could catch the six o'clock train before any one knew-dearest, if you love me-" His roughened, unsteady voice seemed to come to her from a distance, and yet was like a whisper in her own heart.

"Wait till we are past the funeral," she said, catching, in her agony, at the chance of a minute's respite.

At the same moment an old man, who had been standing by the side of the road, leaning on his stick, turned towards the riders, and Francie recognised in him Charlotte's retainer, Billy Grainy. His always bloodshot eyes were redder than ever, his mouth dribbled like a baby's, and the smell of whisky poisoned the air all round him.

"I'm waitin' on thim here this half-hour," he began, in a loud drunken mumble, hobbling to Francie's side, and moving along beside the mare, "as long as they were taking her back the road to cry her at her own gate. Owld bones is wake, asth.o.r.e, owld bones is wake!" He caught at the hem of Francie's habit to steady himself; "be cripes! Miss Duffy was a fine woman, Lord ha' maircy on her. And a great woman! And divil blasht thim that threw her out of her farm to die in the Union-the dom ruffins."

As on the day, now very long ago, when she had first ridden to Gurthnamuckla, Francie tried to shake his hand off her habit; he released it stupidly and staggering to the side of the road, went on grumbling and cursing. The first cart, creaking and rattling under its load of mourners, was beside them by this time, and Billy, for the benefit of its occupants, broke into a howl of lamentation.

"Thanks be to G.o.d Almighty, and thanks be to His Mother, the crayture had thim belonging to her that would bury her like a Christian." He shook his fist at Francie. "Ah-ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it's little thim regards you-" He burst into drunken laughter, bending and tottering over his stick.

Francie, heedless of the etiquette that required that she and Hawkins should stop their horses till the funeral pa.s.sed, struck the mare, and pa.s.sed by him at a quickened pace. The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal; even the mare seemed to share in her agitation, and sidled and fidgeted on the narrow strip of road, that was all the s.p.a.ce left to her by the carts. The coffin was almost abreast of Francie now, and her eyes rested with a kind of fascination on its bare, yellow surface. She became dimly aware that Norry the Boat was squatted beside it on the straw, when one of the other women began suddenly to groan and thump on the coffin-lid with her fists, in preparation for a burst of the Irish Cry, and at the signal Norry fell upon her knees, and flung out her arms inside her cloak, with a gesture that made her look like a great vulture opening its wings for flight. The cloak flapped right across the mare's face, and she swerved from the cart with a buck that loosened her rider in the saddle, and shook her hat off. There was a screech of alarm from all the women, the frightened mare gave a second and a third buck, and at the third Francie was shot into the air, and fell, head first, on the road.

CHAPTER LI.

The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circ.u.mstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that "there's ne'er a pratie ye have that isn't ate with the rats," given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.

So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman's eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into s.p.a.ce through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.

She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.

"Hullo, Roddy!" she called out at last, "is that you? What brings you over so early?"

Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.

"Hullo!" he replied, in a voice not like his own, "is that where you are?"

"Yes, and it's where I'm going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I'm at," brandis.h.i.+ng her saw; "so if you want to talk to me you must come up here."

"All right," said Lambert, gloomily, "I'll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable."

It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the ma.s.sive coils at the back of her head.

"Well, and where's the woman that owns you?" she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.

"At home," he replied, almost vacantly. "I'd have been here half an hour ago or more," he went on after a moment or two, "but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put on."

Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. With his br.i.m.m.i.n.g sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary delay of sympathy was an unkindness.

"That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn't afford to knock his hoof to bits on the hard road." His manner was so portentous that Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had been apparent to her the moment she saw him.

"Why, what's the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look as if you'd been at your own funeral."

"I wish to G.o.d I had! It would be the best thing could happen me."

He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping over her work had made it.

"What makes you talk like that?" she said, a little strangely, as it seemed to him.

He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easier to explain the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much comfortable flexibility in money affairs.

"Charlotte," he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and shaken self-control were moistening again, "I'm in most terrible trouble. Will you help me?"

"Wait till I hear what it is and I'll tell you that," replied Charlotte, with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he felt as if she knew what he was going to say.

"I'm four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it out," he said lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and wood-lice might repeat his secret.

"Four hundred," thought Charlotte, "that's more than I reckoned;" but she said aloud, "My G.o.d! Roddy, how did that happen?"

"I declare to you I don't know how it happened. One thing and another came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay it he found out."

Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession, his head, his shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands nervously twisting his ash plant.

"That's a bad business," said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously, without alarm or even surprise.

"Is he going to give you the sack?" she asked.

"I don't know yet. He didn't say anything definite."

Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview. "If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him next, I believe there'd be an end of it. Not that I'd stay with him," he went on, trying to bl.u.s.ter, "or with any man that treated me this kind of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts."

"Is that the way he found you out?" asked Charlotte, taking up the lid of the packing case and twisting a nail out of it with her hammer, "he must be smarter than you took him for."

"Someone must have put him up to it," said Lambert, "someone who'd got at the books. It beats me to make it out. But what's the good of thinking of that. The thing that's setting me mad is to know how to pay him." He waited to see if Charlotte would speak, but she was occupied in straightening the nail against the wall with her hammer, and he went on with a dry throat. "I'm going to sell all my horses, Charlotte, and I daresay I can raise some money on the furniture; but it's no easy job to raise money in such a hurry as this, and if I'm to be saved from being disgraced, I ought to have it at once to stop his mouth. I believe if I could pay him at once he wouldn't have s.p.u.n.k enough to go any further with the thing." He waited again, but the friend of his youth continued silent. "Charlotte, no man ever had a better friend, through thick and thin, than I've had in you. There's no other person living that I'd put myself under an obligation to but yourself. Charlotte, for the sake of all that's ever been between us, would you lend me the money?"

Her face was hidden from him as she knelt, and he stooped and placed a clinging, affectionate hand upon her shoulder. Miss Mullen got up abruptly, and Lambert's hand fell.