She glanced at him, as aware of the double entendre, and as stirred by it as he had intended her to be. Perhaps a little more than he had intended; at all events, he jerked himself into a sitting position, and, getting on to his feet, stretched himself with almost ostentatious ease.
“Where’s Francie?” he asked, yawning.
“At home, dressmaking,” replied Miss Mullen. She was a little paler than usual. “I think I’ll go in now and have a cup of tea with Lucy,” she said, rising from the garden bench with something like an effort.
“Well, I daresay I’ll take the mare down to Tally Ho, and make Francie go for a ride,” said Lambert; “it’s a pity for anyone to be stewing in the house on a day like this.”
“I wanted her to come here with me, but she wouldn’t,” Charlotte called after him as he turned towards the path that led to the stables. “Maybe she thought there might be metal more attractive for her at home!”
She grinned to herself as she went up the steps. “Me gentleman may put that in his pipe and smoke it,” she thought; “that little hussy would let him think it was for him she was sitting at home!”
Ever since Mrs. Lambert’s first entrance into Lismoyle society, she had found in Charlotte her most intimate and reliable ally. If Mr. Lambert had been at all uneasy as to his bride’s reception by Miss Mullen, he must have been agreeably surprised to find that after a month or so Charlotte had become as useful and pleasant to Mrs. Lambert as in older days she had been to him. That Charlotte should have recognised the paramount necessity of his marrying money, had been to Lambert a proof of her eminent common sense. He had always been careful to impress his obvious destiny upon her, and he had always been grateful to that destiny for having harmlessly fulfilled itself, while yet old Mrs. Mullen’s money was in her own keeping, and her niece was, beyond all question, ineligible. That was Mr. Lambert’s view of the situation; whatever Charlotte’s opinion was, she kept it to herself.
Mrs. Lambert was more than usually delighted to see her ever-sympathising friend on this hot afternoon. One of her chiefest merits in the turkey-hen’s eyes was that she “was as good as any doctor, and twice better than Dr. Rattray, who would never believe the half she went through with palpitations, and buzzings in her ears and roarings in her head,” and the first half hour or so of her visit was consumed in minute detail of her more recent symptoms. The fact that large numbers of women entertain their visitors with biographies, mainly abusive, of their servants, has been dwelt on to weariness by many writers; but, nevertheless, in no history of Mrs. Lambert could this characteristic be conscientiously omitted.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, as her second cup of sweet weak tea was entered upon, “you know that Eliza Hackett, that I got with the highest recommendations from the Honourable Miss Carrick, and thinking she’d be so steady, being a Protestant? Well, last Sunday she went to mass!” She paused, and Charlotte, one of whose most genuine feelings was a detestation of Roman Catholics, exclaimed:
“Goodness alive! what did you let her do that for?”