Mr. Roderick Lambert marched blandly along beside her, with no wish to change places with anyone agitating his bosom. His handsome brown eyes rested approvingly on Francie’s flushed face, and the thought that mainly occupied his mind was surprise that Nosey Fitzpatrick should have had such a pretty daughter. He was aware of Francie’s diffident glances, but thought they were due to his good looks and his new suit of clothes, and he became even more patronising than before. At last, quite unconsciously, he hit the dreaded point.
“Well, and what do you think your aunt will say when she hears how I found you running away in the milk-cart?”
“I don’t know,” replied Francie, getting very red.
“Well, what will you say to me if I don’t tell her?”
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, sure you won’t tell mamma!” entreated the Fitzpatrick children, faithful to their leader. “Francie’d be killed if mamma thought she was playing with Tommy Whitty!”
They were nearing the Fitzpatrick mansion by this time, and Lambert stood still at the foot of the steps and looked down at the small group of petitioners with indulgent self-satisfaction.
“Well, Francie, what’ll you do for me if I don’t tell?”
“I don’t know.” Then with a defiance that she was far from feeling, “You may tell her if you like!”
Lambert laughed easily as he followed her up the steps.
“You’re very angry with me now, aren’t you? Well, never mind, we’ll be friends, and I won’t tell on you this time.”
The east wind was crying round a small house in the outskirts of an Irish country town. At nightfall it had stolen across the grey expanse of Lough Moyle, and given its first shudder among the hollies and laurestinas that hid the lower windows of Tally Ho Lodge from the too curious passer-by, and at about two o’clock of the November night it was howling so inconsolably in the great tunnel of the kitchen chimney, that Norry the Boat, sitting on a heap of turf by the kitchen fire, drew her shawl closer about her shoulders, and thought gruesomely of the Banshee.
The long trails of the monthly roses tapped and scratched against the window panes, so loudly sometimes that two cats, dozing on the rusty slab of a disused hothearth, opened their eyes and stared, with the expressionless yet wholly alert scrutiny of their race. The objects in the kitchen were scarcely more than visible in the dirty light of a hanging lamp, and the smell of paraffin filled the air. High presses and a dresser lined the walls, and on the top of the dresser, close under the blackened ceiling, it was just possible to make out the ghostly sleeping form of a cockatoo. A door at the end of the kitchen opened into a scullery of the usual prosaic, not to say odorous kind, which was now a cavern of darkness, traversed by twin green stars that moved to and fro as the lights move on a river at night, and looked like anything but what they were, the eyes of cats prowling round a scullery sink.