While he was speaking there was the sound of quick trotting on the road, and Miss Mullen saw a white straw hat and a brown billycock moving swiftly along over the tops of the evergreens. A dog-cart with a white-faced chestnut swung in at the gate, and Miss Fitzpatrick’s hat was immediately swept off her head by a bough of laburnum. Its owner gave a shrill cry and made a snatch at the reins, with an idea apparently of stopping the horse.
“No, you don’t,” said Mr. Lambert, intercepting the snatch with his whip hand; “you’re going to be handed over to your aunt just as you are.”
Half a dozen steps brought them to the door, and the chestnut pulled up with his pink nose almost between the curtains of the inside car. It was hard to say whether Miss Mullen had heard Lambert’s remark, which had certainly been loud enough to enable her to do so, but her only reply was an attack upon the carman.
“Take your car out o’ that, ye great oaf!” she vociferated “can’t ye make way for your betters?” Then with a complete change of voice, “Well, me dear Francie, you’re welcome, you’re welcome.”
The greeting was perceptibly less hearty than that which had been squandered on the trunk and bonnet-box; but an emotion réchauffé necessarily loses flavour. Francie had jumped to the ground with a reckless disregard of the caution demanded by the steps of a dog-cart, and stooping her hatless head, kissed the hard cheek that Charlotte tendered for her embrace.
“Thank you very much, I’m very glad to come,” she said, in a voice whose Dublin accent had been but little modified by the six years that had lightly gone over her since the August Sunday when she had fled from Tommy Whitty in the milkman’s cart. “And look at me the show I am without my hat! And it’s all his fault!” with a lift of her blue eyes to Lambert, “he wouldn’t let me stop and pick it up.”
Charlotte looked up at her with the wide smile of welcome still stiff upon her face. The rough golden heap of curls on the top of Francie’s head was spangled with raindrops and her coat was grey with wet.
“Well, if Mr. Lambert had had any sense,” said Miss Mullen, “he’d have let you come in the covered car. Here, Louisa, go fetch Miss Fitzpatrick’s hat.”
“Ah, no, sure she’ll get all wet,” said Francie, starting herself before the less agile Louisa could emerge from behind her mistress, and running down the drive.
“Did you come down from Dublin to-day, Roddy?” said Charlotte.