“Oh, very well, have it your own way,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick acrimoniously, “I suppose you have it all settled, and he’ll be married to her by special license before the week’s out.”
“Well, I don’t care, Robert, you wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d only buried his wife four months and a half ago—though I will say he’s in deep mourning—but for all that no one’d blame him that he didn’t think much of that poor creature, and ’twould be a fine match for Francie if she’d take him.”
“Would she take him!” echoed Mr. Fitzpatrick scornfully; “would a duck swim? I never saw the woman yet that wouldn’t half hang herself to get married!”
“Ah, have done being so cross, Robert, Christmas day and all; I wonder you married at all since you think so little of women.”
Finding this argument not easy to answer, Mr. Fitzpatrick said nothing, and his wife, too much interested to linger over side issues, continued,
“The girls say they heard him asking her to drive to the Dargle with him to-morrow, and he’s brought a grand box of sweets for the children as a Christmas box, and six lovely pair of gloves for Francie! ’Pon me word, I call her a very lucky girl!”
“Well, if I was a woman it isn’t that fellow I’d fancy,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, unexpectedly changing his ground, “but as, thank God, I’m not, it’s no affair of mine.” Having delivered himself of this sentiment, Mr. Fitzpatrick went downstairs. The smell of hot cakes rose deliciously upon the air, and, as his niece emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of them in her hand, and called to him to hurry before they got cold, he thought to himself that Lambert would have the best of the bargain if he married her.
Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account, any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a butter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he liked, she thought, with a little flash of amusement and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.
The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on the smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie’s spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure parties that vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.
“Doesn’t it look fearful lonely to-day?” said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself highly. “You can’t hear a thing but the running of the water.”