“What reason!” Lambert almost choked from the intolerable audacity and heartlessness of the question. “Are you in your right mind to ask me that? You, that’s been like a—a near relation to me all these years, or pretending to be! There was a time you wouldn’t have done this to me, you know it damned well, and so do I. You were glad enough to do anything for me then, so long as I’d be as much as civil to you, and now, I suppose, this is your dirty devilish spite, because you were cut out by someone else!”
She did not flinch as the words went through and through her.
“Take care of yourself!” she said, grinning at him, “perhaps you’re not the one to talk about being cut out! Oh, I don’t think ye need look as if ye didn’t understand me. At all events, all ye have to do is to go home and ask your servants—or, for the matter of that, anyone in the streets of Lismoyle—who it is that’s cut ye out, and made ye the laughing-stock of the country?”
She put her hand on the dusty beam beside her, giddy with her gratified impulse, as she saw him take the blow and wither under it.
She scarcely heard at first the strange and sudden sound of commotion that had sprung up like a wind in the house opposite. The windows were all open, and through them came the sound of banging doors and running footsteps, and then Norry’s voice screaming something as she rushed from room to room. She was in the kitchen now, and the words came gasping and sobbing through the open door.
“Where’s Miss Charlotte? Where is she? O God! O God! Where is she? Miss Francie’s killed, her neck’s broke below on the road! O God of Heaven, help us!”
Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.
FINIS.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN