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By Root 1630 0

the mare seemed to share in her agitation, and sidled and fidgeted on the narrow strip of road, that was all the space left to her by the carts. The coffin was almost abreast of Francie now, and her eyes rested with a kind of fascination on its bare, yellow surface. She became dimly aware that Norry the Boat was squatted beside it on the straw, when one of the other women began suddenly to groan and thump on the coffin-lid with her fists, in preparation for a burst of the Irish Cry, and at the signal Norry fell upon her knees, and flung out her arms inside her cloak, with a gesture that made her look like a great vulture opening its wings for flight. The cloak flapped right across the mare’s face, and she swerved from the cart with a buck that loosened her rider in the saddle, and shook her hat off. There was a screech of alarm from all the women, the frightened mare gave a second and a third buck, and at the third Francie was shot into the air, and fell, head first, on the road.

* * *

CHAPTER LI.

The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circumstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that “there’s ne’er a pratie ye have that isn’t ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.

So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman’s eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into space through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.

She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.

“Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, “is that you? What brings you over so early?”

Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.

“Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, “is that where you are?”

“Yes, and it’s where I’m going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I’m at,” brandishing her saw; “so if you want to talk to me you must come up here.”

“All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, “I’ll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable.”

It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the massive coils at the back of her head.

“Well, and where’s the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.

“At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. “I’d have been here half an hour ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, “but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get