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By Root 1642 0

the stream of foreign life was passing by her, and leaving her face as uniterested and wearied as it ever had been when she looked out of the window at Albatros Villa at the messenger boys and bakers’ carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe, its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte’s piano, while Mr. Hawkins, holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws to thump a bass. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down, was being played; he had petended there that he was her music teacher, and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a tea-spoon, and gone on with all knds of nonsense. The carriage started forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place beside her.

“Of all the asses unhung these French fellows are the biggest.” he said fervently, “and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I couldn’t her my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last, anyhow, and you’ve got to get out before me.”

The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not answer a word. She turned her back on her husband, and stepping our of the carriage she walked unsteadily across the countryard in the white glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to him from the spectacle of her wet checks and trembling lips. She made for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor. The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the tune that had turn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget its associations and recover herself, catching up an illustrated paper to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two before Lambert followed her.

“Here’s a go!” he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his hand, “here’s a wire to say that Sir Benjamin’s dead, and they want me back at once.”

* * *

CHAPTER XLI.

The morning after Lambert received the telegram announcing Sir Benjamin’s death, he despatched one to Miss Charlotte Mullen at Gurthnamuckla in which he asked her to notify his immediate return to his household at Rosemount. He had always been in the hahit of relying on her help in small as well as great occasions, and now that he had had that unexpectedly civil letter from her, he had turned to her at once without giving the matter much consideration. It was never safe to trust to a servant’s interpretation of the cramped language of a telegram, and moreover, in his self-sufficient belief in his own knowledge of women, he thought that it would flatter her and keep her in good humour if he asked her to give directions to his household. He would have been less confident of his own sagacity had he seen the set of Miss Mullen’s jaw as she read the message, and heard the laugh which she permitted to herself as soon as Louisa had left the room.

“It’s a pity he didn’t hire me to be his major-domo as well as his steward and stud-groom!” she said to herself, “and his financier into the bargain! I declare I don’t know what he’d do without me”

The higher and more subtle side of Miss Mullen’s nature had exacted of the quivering savage that had been awakened by Lambert’s second marriage that the answer to his letter should be of a conventional and non-committing kind; and so, when her brain was still on fire with hatred and invective, her facile