The Pale Horse that happened after the Fourth Seal was broken!

She would sit as still as if she were frozen, while she thought of the Pale Horse coming crashing through Dharrig Wood, with Death on his back, and Hell following with him—­she always thought of him in that black wood of pine trees—­

“Wake up, Christian!” Miss Weyman, the governess, would say.

One of the Twins would hiss between his teeth:  “Christian, dost thou see them?”

Christian would feel a spiritual bump, as though she had been flung off her chair on to the schoolroom floor, and Miss Weyman (always enviously spoken of by adjacent mammas as “that most sensible little Englishwoman”) would say: 

“I wonder how much you heard of what I was reading!  I wish I could see you learning to have a little more concentration!”

Whereas, did the excellent Miss Weyman only know it, a very little more concentration on Christian’s part, and it is possible that she, and Judith, and the Twins, might all have seen the Pale Horse thundering past the schoolroom windows.  Stranger things have happened.  The Indian rope and basket trick, for instance.

“A most curious child—­a perfect passion for animals, and so dreamy, if you know what I mean,” Miss Weyman would say to a comrade visitor.  “And the things that she seems to have learnt from the huntsman!  But really a nice little thing, and clever, too, though a most erratic worker!  Now, Judith—­” Miss Weyman felt there was some satisfaction in teaching Judith. She could concentrate, if the comrade visitor liked!  Nothing was a difficulty to her!  And her memory!  And her energy—­Miss Weyman freely admitted that Judith was three years older than Christian, but still—­

In short, Judith was a credit to any sensible little Englishwoman, but Christian had a way of knowing nothing (as touching arithmetic, for example), or too much (as touching Shakespeare and the Book of Revelation), that implied considerable independence as to the instructions of Miss Weyman, and no sensible little Englishwoman could be expected to enjoy that.

CHAPTER VII

It is not peculiar to Irish incomes to fail to develop in response to increasing demands upon them.  It was, however, a distinctive feature of the incomes of those who were Irish landlords during the latter years of the Victorian era, to shrink in steady response to the difficulties of English government in Ireland.  Only Irish people can understand the complicated processes of erosion to which Dick Talbot-Lowry’s resources were subjected, or can realise the tests of fortitude and endurance to a man of spirit, that were involved by the visitations of “Commissioners,” with their fore-ordained mission of lowering Dick’s rents, rents that, in Dick’s opinion, were already philanthropically low.  Major Talbot-Lowry, like many of his tribe, though a pessimist in politics,