They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking down the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming race among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.
“I don’t call it lonely,” said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courtship; “how many more would you like?”
“Oh, lots,” replied Francie, “but I’m not going to tell you who they are!”
“I know one, anyhow,” said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.
When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.
“Who do you know?”
Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart’s-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.
“Wouldn’t you like it now if you saw—” he paused and looked at Francie—“who shall we say—Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“Wouldn’t you though! You’d run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle,” said Lambert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.