CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FIRST OF OCTOBER.

'As weel try to sup soor dook wi' an elshin as shoot in comfort wi' that coofor waur—that gowk Hawkey Sharpe—so thank gudeness he's no wi' us this day!' snorted old Gavin Fowler, the gamekeeper, when, on the morning of the all-important 1st of October, he shouldered his gun and whistled forth the dogs.

But Hawkey Sharpe was fated to be cognisant of one grim feature in that day's sport in a way none knew save himself.

So October had come—'the time,' says Colonel Hawker, 'when the farmer has leisure to enjoy a little sport after all his hard labour without neglecting his business; and the gentleman, by a day's shooting at that time, becomes refreshed and invigorated, instead of wearing out himself and his dogs by slaving after partridges under the broiling sun of the preceding month. The evenings begin to close, and he then enjoys his home and fireside, after a day's shooting of sufficient duration to brace his nerves and make everything agreeable.'

'We'll make good bags to-day,' was the opinion of all.

Despite Maude's entreaties, Jack Elliot was too keen a sportsman to forego the first day of the pheasant shooting, though his scar was scarcely healed, and thought, though he did not say so to her, that next October might see him 'potting' a darker kind of game in the Soudan.

'Get me a golden pheasant's wing for my hat, dear Roland,' said Annot laughingly, as he came forth with his favourite breechloader from the gun-room; and though such birds were scarce in the East Neuk, the request proved somewhat of a fatal one, as we shall show; but Annot had no foreboding of that when, with her usual childish effusiveness, she bade Roland farewell, as he went to join the group of sportsmen and dogs at the porte-cochère.

'You have no father, I believe, Miss Drummond?' said Mrs. Lindsay, who had been observing her.

'No; poor papa died quite suddenly about two years ago,' was the reply.

'Suddenly?' queried Mrs. Lindsay, becoming interested.

'Yes,' said Annot hesitatingly.

'In what way—by an accident?'

'Oh, dear—no.'

'How then?'

'Of disease of the heart; we never suspected it, but he dropped down dead—quite dead—while poor mamma was speaking to him about a drive in the park—but oh! what have I said to startle you so?' she added, on perceiving that Mrs. Lindsay grew pale as ashes, and half closing her eyes, pressed her hand upon her left breast, a custom she had when excited.

'Nothing—nothing—only a faintness,' she said, with something of irritation; 'it is the wind without.'

'But there is none,' urged Annot.

'I often feel this when stormy weather is at hand,' replied the other with an attempt at a smile, but a ghastly one; and Annot said no more, as she had already seen that the slightest reference to her secret ailment irritated Mrs. Lindsay, who abruptly left her.

'There is not much liking lost between us,' thought the young lady, as she adjusted in the breast of her morning dress a bunch of stephanotis Roland had given her. 'It is evident, too, that Mrs. Lindsay knows little of county society, and is one with whom county society is shy of associating. Well, well; when Roland and I are married, this grim matron shall be relegated from Earlshaugh to the Dower House at King's Wood. It is a pity we shall not be able to send her farther off.'

Meanwhile the sportsmen were getting to work, and the guns began to bang in the coverts.

Autumn was rapidly advancing now; every portion of the beautiful landscape told the eye so. The summer look was gone, and the sound of the leaves fluttering down was apt to make one thoughtful. Then even the sun seems older; he rises later, and goes to bed earlier. The singing birds had gone from the King's Wood and the Earl's Haugh to warmer climes. The swallows were preparing to leave, assembling at their own places on the banks of the burn, waiting till thousands mustered for their mysterious southern flight. Elsewhere, as Clare has it, might be seen—

'The hedger stopping gaps, amid the leaves,
Which time o'erhead in every colour weaves;
The milkmaid passing, with a timid look,
From stone to stone across the brimming brook;
The cottar journeying with his noisy swine
Along the wood side, where the branches twine;
Shaking from many oaks the acorns brown,
Or from the hedges red haws dashing down.'

But the scenery was lost on the sportsmen, who had eyes and ears for the pheasants alone!

The keepers and beaters were waiting at the corner of the King's Wood when Roland and his friends made their appearance.

Though the copses had not lost all their autumnal glory, the season was an advanced one; a cold breeze swept down the grassy glens, and frost rime hung for a time on boughs and thick undergrowth, sparkling like diamonds in the bright morning sunshine, till melted away; and in the clear air was heard that which someone describes as the indescribable and never-to-be-forgotten sound for the sportsman—that of the pheasant as he rises before the advancing line of beaters—when the cock bird, roused by the tapping of their sticks on the tree trunks, whirrs high over the tops to some sanctuary in the wood, which the gun beneath him fates him never to reach.

A spirt of smoke spouts upward, some brown feathers puff out in the air, and with closed wings the beautiful bird falls within some thirty yards of its killer.

Though the shooting was most successful, other coverts than the King's Wood were tried, some of which gave pheasants, others rabbits and hares, till fairly good bags were made; and so the sportsmen shot down the side of a remote spur of the Ochil hills—save the banging of the guns no other sounds being heard but the beating of sticks against trees or whin bushes, and the voices of Gavin and the beaters shouting, 'Mark cock,' ''Ware hen,' 'Hare forward,' and so on, till a dark dell was reached—a regular zeriba (Roland called it) of bracken, briars, and gorse—where luncheon was to meet the party—one of the not least pleasant features of a day's shooting; but the sportsmen had become so intent on their work that they now realized fully for the first time that the day had become overcast; masses of dark gathered cloud had enveloped the sun; that dense gray mist was rolling along the upper slopes of the hills, and in the distant direction of Earlshaugh, the dark and blurred horizon showed that rain was pouring aslant, and so heavily that Maude and Hester, who had promised to bring the viands in the pony phaeton, would not dream of leaving the shelter of the house.

'Homeward' was now the word, but not before the last beat of the day—reserved as a bonne bouche—was made, though noon was past and gloom was gathering speedily.

At the upper end of a little glen a long belt of firs bounded a field beyond which rose another belt, and in the field the guns were posted, while the pheasants could be seen making for the head of the wood.

Nearer and more near came the tapping of the beaters' rods, until one gallant bird rose at the edge and was knocked over by Roland, who was far away on the extreme right of the line. The tapping went gently on lest too many birds should be put up at once. Some rapid firing followed—all the more rapidly that the mist and rain were coming down the hill-slopes together.

In quick succession the birds left the covert, some flying to one flank, some to the other, while others rose high in the air, and some remained grovelling amid the undergrowth, never to leave it alive.

It was no slaughter—no battue—however; about a dozen brace were knocked over and picked up ere the mist descended over the field and its boundary belts of fir trees, and drawing their cartridges, in twos and threes, with their guns under their arms and their coat collars up, for the rain was falling now, the sportsmen began to take their way back towards the house, which was then some miles distant: and all reached it, in the gathering gloom of a prematurely early evening—weary, worn, yet in high spirits, and—save for the contents of their flasks—unrefreshed, when they discovered that Roland Lindsay was not with them—that in some unaccountable way they had, somehow, lost or missed him on the mountain side.

CHAPTER XXIX.

ALARM AND ANXIETY.

Time passed on—the mist and rain deepened around Earlshaugh, veiling coppice, glen, and field, and Roland did not appear.

He must have lost his way; but then every foot of the ground was so familiar to him that such seemed impossible; and the idea of an accident did not as yet occur to any one.

Thus none waited for him at the late luncheon table, and then, as in the smoke-room and over the billiard balls, Jack Elliot and others talked only of the events of the day—how the birds were flushed and knocked over—of hits and misses, of game clean-killed, and so forth; how one gorgeous old pheasant in particular came crashing down through the wiry branches of the dark firs in the agonies of death; and how deftly Roland killed his game, without requiring a keeper to give the coup de grâce—there were never many runners before him, and how 'he looked as fresh as a daisy after doing the ninety acre copse,' and so forth, till his protracted absence and the closing in of the darkness, with the ringing of the dressing-bell for dinner, made all conscious of the time, and led them to wonder "what on earth" had become of him—what had happened, and whither had he, or could he have gone!

Speculations were many and endless,

'Some fatality seems surely to attend the shooting here now!' said Mrs. Lindsay anxiously, as she nervously pressed her large white, ringed hands together.

To some of those present the stately dinner, served up in the lofty old dining-room, was a kind of mockery; and Maude and Hester, who dreaded they knew not what, made but a pretence of eating, while the presence of the servants proved a wholesome, if galling, restraint to them; but not so to the irrepressible Annot, who talked away as usual to the gentlemen present, and displayed all her pretty little tricks of manner as if no cause for surmise or anxiety was on the tapis.

The unusual pallor, silence, and abstraction of Mrs. Lindsay, as she sat at the head of the table, while Jack Elliot officiated as host, were painfully apparent to those who, like Hester, watched her.

But she had her own secret thoughts, in which none, as yet, shared!

An attempt had been made to injure Elliot, perhaps mortally, under cover of a blunder—a mishap. Had the same evil hand been at work again?

A cloud there was no dispelling began to settle over all; conversation became broken, disjointed, overstrained, and the cloud seemed deeper as a rising storm howled round the lofty old house, shook the wet ivy against the windows, and grew in force with the gathering gloom of night.

Annot's equanimity amid these influences grieved Maude and annoyed Hester, who recalled her twaddling grief when Roland had been but a few hours absent from her in Edinburgh.

'How can she bear herself so?' said Maude.

'Because she is heartless,' replied Hester; 'and to say the least of her, I never could imagine Annot, with all her prettiness and espièglerie, at the head of a household, or taking her place in society like a woman of sense.'

Hour succeeded hour, and still there was no appearance of Roland, and the clang of the great iron bell in the porte-cochère was listened for in vain.

So the night came undoubtedly on, but what a night it proved to be of storm and darkness!

The rain hissed on the swaying branches of the great trees now almost stripped and bare; it tore down the flowers from the rocks on which the house stood, and wrenched away the matted ivy from turret and chimney; the green turf of the lawn and meadows was soaked till it became a kind of bog; the winding walks that descended to the old fortalice became miniature cascades that shone through the gloom, while the wind wailed in the machicolations of the upper walls in weird and solemn gusts, to die away down the haugh below.

That a tempest had been coming some of the older people about the place, like Gavin Fowler, had foretold, as that loud and hollow noise like distant thunder that often precedes a storm among the Scottish mountains had been heard among the spurs of the Ochils, and from which in the regions farther North, the superstitious Highlanders, as General Stewart tells, presage many omens, when 'the Spirit of the Mountain shrieks.'

All night long the house-bell was clanged at intervals from the bartizan, to the alarm of the neighbourhood.

London-bred Annot was scared at last by the elemental war, by these strange sounds, and the pale faces of those about her, and with blanched visage she peered from the deeply embayed windows into the darkness without, with genuine alarm, now.

How often had she and Roland rambled in yonder green park, not a vestige of which could now be seen even between the flying glimpses of the moon, or crossed it together, talking of and planning out that future which he seemed to approach with such doubt and diffidence latterly; or as he went forth with his breechloader on his shoulder and she clinging with interlaced hands on his right arm—he tall, strong, and stalwart, with his dogs at his heels, and looking down lovingly and trustfully into her fair, smiling face.

Now they might never there and thus walk again, yet her tears seemed to be lodged very deep just then.

But softer Hester's thoughts were more acute. Had Roland perished in some unforeseen, mysterious, and terrible manner? Was this the last of her secret love-dream, and had all hope, sweetness, glamour and beauty gone out of her heart—out of her life altogether?

Oh, what had happened?

Could Hawkey Sharpe—no, she thrust even fear of him on one side; but, as the time stole on and the midnight hour passed without tidings, she tortured herself with questions, lay down without undressing, and wetted her pillow with tears for the doubly lost companion of her infancy, of her girlhood, and its riper years—thinking all the while that her sorrow, her longing, and passionate terrors were for the affianced of another—of the artful Annot Drummond.

Clinging to the supposition that he must have mistaken his way in the swiftly descending mist, Jack Elliot and other guests, with serving-men, keepers, and hunters, carrying lanterns and poles, set out more than once into the darkness, rack, and storm to search without avail, and to return wet and weary.

Hour after hour the circle at Earlshaugh watched and waited, trembling at every gust and listening to every sound—shaken and weakened by a suspense that grew intolerable.

From the windows nothing could be seen—not even the tossing trees close by, or the dark outline of the distant mountains. The listeners' hearts beat quick—gust after gust swept past, but brought no welcome sound with it, and they became familiarized with the idea that some catastrophe must have happened or tidings of the absent must have come by that time; and with each returning party of searchers, hope grew less and less, while those most vitally concerned in the absence of Roland began to shrink from questioning or consulting them, as they were already too much disposed by their nature to adopt the gloomiest and most morbid views; and still the storm gusts continued to shake the windows, and dash against them showers of leaves and the wet masses of overhanging foliage.

Without his cheerful presence and general bonhomie of manner, how empty and void the great old drawing-room—yea, the house itself—seemed now! All his occasional strange, abstracted, and thoughtful moods were forgotten, and now the hours of the dark autumnal morning wore inexorably on.

A few of the guests had retired to their rooms, but the majority passed the time on easy-chairs, watching and waiting for what might transpire. Now and then a dog whined mournfully, and cocked its ears as if to listen, adding to the eerie nature of the vigil.

'Three,' said Hester to Maude when the clocks were heard striking. Then followed 'four' and 'five.' The fires were made up anew.

'Oh, my God, what can have happened!' thought the two girls in their hearts, glancing at Annot, who, overcome by weariness, had dropped into a profound sleep; and ere long the red rays of the sun, as he rose from his bed in the German Sea, began to tinge the summits of the distant Ochils and the nearer Lomonds, and the storm was dying fast away.

It was impossible now to suppose that he could in any manner have lost himself, or taken shelter in the house of any friend or tenant, as no message came from him, and the last idea was completely dissipated by the final return of Gavin Fowler, who, with his staff of keepers and beaters, had been at every farm and house within miles making inquiries, but in vain.

Nothing had been seen or heard of the lost one.

Gavin, however, had seen something which, though he spoke not of it then, had given him cause for anxious thought and much speculation. This was Mr. Hawkey Sharpe (who for some time past had betaken him elsewhere) rapidly and furtively passing out by the Weird Yett, well muffled up, either to conceal his face or for warmth against the cold morning air; and by the path he had taken, he had evidently come by the back private door from the house of Earlshaugh!

'What's i' the wind noo?' muttered the old gamekeeper, with a glare in his dark gray eye, and with knitted brows, 'But there's nae hawk, Maister Hawkey Sharpe, flees sae high but he will fa' to some lure. They were gey scant o' bairns that brocht you up.'

CHAPTER XXX.

THE KELPIE'S CLEUGH.

On the extreme flank of his party, and rather farther out or off than usual, Roland, intent on following his game, took no heed at first of the swiftly down-coming mist, till it fell like a curtain between him and his companions, who had drawn their cartridges and ceased firing. Even the sound of their voices was muffled by the density of the atmosphere and he knew not where they were; but, thinking the cloud would lift, he felt not the least concern, but went forward, as he conceived, in the direction of home, and that which led towards the field where the last beat of the day had been made; but as he proceeded the ground seemed less and less familiar to him.

Over a high bank, slippery with dead leaves and the thawed rime of the past morning, he went, a nasty place to get across, and in doing so he prudently removed the cartridges from his gun, lest he might slip, trip, or stumble to the detriment of himself or some adjacent companion.

Pausing at times, he uttered a hallo, but got no response. He could see nothing of the belts of firs before referred to; but he came upon clumps of hazel, nearly destitute of leaves, growing thickly about the roots, and expanding as they rose some nine feet or so above the ground.

There was a dense undergrowth of bracken and intertwisted brambles here, a tangle of dead leaves, stems, and thorns, most perplexing to find one's self among in a dense mist. From amid these a rabbit or hare scudded forth; but he took no heed of it.

Suddenly a bird—a fine golden pheasant—whirred up, and settled down again in the covert very near him. He remembered the request of Annot. Never had the latter seemed brighter, dearer, or sweeter too, than that morning when she playfully asked him to bring a golden pheasant's wing, and secretly returned his farewell caress with such joy and warmth.

Dropping a charge into one of his barrels, he fired, but failed to kill the bird, which, hit somewhere, beat the earth with its wings and rolled or ran forward into the mist. Dropping his gun, Roland darted forward after it—the tendril of a bramble caught his feet, and a gasping cry escaped him as he fell heavily on his face and then downward—he knew not where!

Instinctively and desperately he clutched something; it was turf on a rocky edge. He felt it yielding; a small tree, a silver birch, grew near, and wildly he caught a branch thereof; and swung out over some profundity, he knew not what or where, till like a flash of lightning there came upon his memory the Burn Cleugh, a deep, rocky chasm, which had been the mysterious terror of his boyhood—as the fabled shade of a treacherous kelpie, a hairy fiend with red eyes and red claws—a rent or rift in the low hills some miles from his home, and at the bottom of which, about sixty feet and more below, the burn referred to as passing through the Earl's Haugh, and near the hamlet of the same name, flowed towards Eden.

'Save me—God save me!' rose to his lips, and with each respiration as he clung to the branch and the bead-drops started to his forehead, he lived a lifetime—a lifetime as it were of keenest agony.

He knew well the profoundity of the rocky abyss that yawned in obscurity below him, and he heard the slow gurgle of the burn as it chafed against the stones that barred its downward passage, and, mechanically, as one in a dream who fears to fall, he strove to sway his body upward, but could find no rest for his footsteps, and felt that the birch branch to which he clung was gradually but surely—rending! He had no terror of death in itself—none of death in the battlefield, as we have shown; but from such a fate as this he shrank; his soul seemed to die within him, and with every respiration there seemed to come the agony of a whole lifetime.

His nerve was gone, and no marvel that it was so. He might escape instant death; but not the most dreadful mutilation; and, sooth to say, he dreaded that a thousand times more than death.

One glance downward into that dark and misty chasm was in itself a summons to death, and he knew well the terrible bed of stones and boulders that lay below.

He became paralyzed—paralyzed with a great and stunning fear. The rending of the branch continued; his arms were waxing faint and strained; his fingers feeble; and it was only a question of moments between time and eternity—fall—fall he must—how far—how deep down—the depth he had forgotten.

The suspense was horrible; yet it was full of the dire certainty of a dreadful end.

Every act and scene of his past life came surging up to memory—the memory of less than a minute, now.

The branch parted; but, still grasping it, down he went whizzing through the mist—there was a stunning crash as he fell first on a ledge of rock and then into the stream's stony bed below, and then sight and sense and sound passed away from him!

How long he lay there he knew not. After a time consciousness returned, but he felt himself incapable of action—of motion—almost of thinking.

The ledge or shelf of rock, which was covered by soft turf, had first received him, and thus broken the fall, which ended, we have said, in the bed of the stream, in which he was partially immersed from the waist downwards; but whether his limbs were broken or dislocated he knew not then, and there he lay helpless, with the cold current trickling past and partly over him, the rocks towering sharply and steeply up on either side of him to where their summits were hidden in the masses of eddying mist, that now began to rise and sink as the wind increased and the afternoon began to close.

How long might he lie there undiscovered in that desolate spot, which he knew so few approached? How long would he last, suffering as he did then? And was a miserable death, such as this—there and amid such surroundings—to be the end of his young life, with all its bright hopes and loving aspirations for the future?

Cold though he began to feel—icy cold—hot bead drops suffused his temples at the idea, and at all his fancy began to picture, and more than once a weak cry for aid escaped him.

The Cleugh became more gloomy; he heard the bellowing of the wind, and felt the falling rain, the torrents of which were certain to swell and flood this tributary of the Eden, and the terror of being drowned helplessly, as the darkness fell and the water rose, impelled him to exertion, and by efforts that seemed almost superhuman he contrived to drag his bruised body and—as he felt assured—broken limbs somewhat more out of the bed of the stream; but the agony of this was so great that he nearly fainted.

With all his constitutional strength and hardihood, he was certain that he could never survive the night; and even if he did, the coming morning and day might bring him no succour, for save when in search of a lost sheep or lamb in winter, what shepherd ever sought the recesses of the Kelpie's Cleugh?

As he lay there, with prayer in his heart and on his lips, his whole past life—and then indeed did he thank God that it had been well-nigh a blameless one—seemed to revolve again and again as in a panorama before him; while a thousand forgotten and minute details came floating back rapidly and vividly to memory.

His boyhood, his dead brother, his mother's face, as he had seen it bending over him tenderly in his little cot, while she whispered the prayer she was wont to give over him every night, till it became woven up with the life of his infancy and riper years; his roystering, fox-hunting father; his regiment—the jovial mess—the gallant parade, with familiar faces seen amid the gleam of arms; his service in Egypt—Tel-el-Kebir, with its frowning earthworks towering through the star-lit gloom and dust of the night-march, till the red artillery and musketry flashed over them in garlands of fire, as the columns swept on and the Highland pipes sent up their pæan of victory!

Then came memories of Kashgate—its bloody and ghastly massacre—the flight therefrom into the desert; and then sweet Merlwood and Hester Maule, and Annot with her fair and goddess-like loveliness.

Then came the realities of the present again in all their misery, power, and sway—the ceaseless rush of the cold stream, the pouring rain upon his upturned face, the drifting clouds, the occasional glinting of the stars, the rustle of the wet leaves torn from the trees by the gusty wind, and the too probable chances of the coming death through pain, chill, exposure, and utter exhaustion.

Again, exerting all his powers, a despairing cry escaped him, and this time a sound responded. It was only a heron, however, that, full of terror, seemed to flash out from its nest in the rocks, and winged its way out of sight in a moment.

As he lay there it seemed to him as if time had a torturing power of spinning out its seconds, minutes, and hours that he had never known it to have before.

But to lie there perishing within almost rifle-shot of the roof under which he was born—so near his friends and so many who loved him—Annot more than all—was a terrible conviction—one apparently unnatural, unrealizable!

The mist had gone now, and the dark rocks between which he lay began to assume strange and gruesome forms in the weird light of the occasional stars, still more so when once or twice a weird glimpse of the stormy moon penetrated into the Cleugh.

'Oh, God!' cried he imploringly, 'to perish—to perish thus!'

At that moment, in a swiftly passing gleam of moonshine, he saw a face—a human face—peering over the rocks above as if seeking to penetrate the watery gloom below, and again a cry for help—help for the sake of mercy, for the sake of Heaven, escaped him.

For a moment, we say, the face was there; the next it vanished, as a dark mass of cloud swept over the silver disc of the moon, and a sound, painfully and unmistakably like a mocking laugh, reached the ears of the sufferer.

The face—if face it actually was—and not that of the fabled fiend, the Kelpie of the Cleugh, appeared no more; the hours went by; no succour came, and Roland, as he now resigned himself to the worst, believed that what he had seen, or thought he had seen, was but the creation of his own fevered and over-excited fancy.

CHAPTER XXXI.

'ALL OVER NOW!'

But it was no delirious delusion of Roland's that he had seen a human face, or heard a human voice respond mockingly to his despairing cry for aid.

It singularly chanced that about an hour before midnight, and during a lull in the storm, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who—as we have said—had been seen hovering about the vicinity of Earlshaugh, was betaking himself thither, intent on seeing his sister, the mistress thereof (whom he also deemed his banker) concerning some of his monetary affairs, and had been passing on foot by the narrow sheep-path that skirted the verge of the dangerous Cleugh, when the occasional cries of the sufferer reached his ear, and on peering down he had speedily discovered by his voice who that sufferer was.

He paused for a minute till quite assured of the fact, and though at a loss to conceive how the event had come to pass, he proceeded with quickened steps for some miles, till he reached the private entrance—for which he had a key—but not for the purpose of raising an alarm, or procuring or sending forth succour. Of that he had not the least intention, as we shall show. 'In the place where the tree falleth, there let it lie,' was the text of Mr. Hawkey Sharpe just then.

He found the entire household on the qui vive, and heard that Roland Lindsay was missing, thus corroborating to the fullest extent any detail that might be wanting, and obviating all doubt as to the episode at the Cleugh.

'What a fuss,' said he mockingly, 'about a storm of rain!'

It now rested with him, by the utterance of a single word, or little more, to save the missing one from a miserable and lingering death; but that word remained unuttered, and with a grim and mocking smile upon his coarse lips, and a gleam of fiendish joy in his watery gray eyes, he proceeded to his sanctum, up the old turret stair, without the sensation of his steps going downward according to the household tradition.

'Lindsay lost in this storm!' he thought. 'How came he to tumble or to be thrown down there—thrown, by whom?' he added mentally, for his mind was ever prone to evil. 'Then I am not wrong—it was his voice I heard at the bottom of the Kelpie's Cleugh! Ha! ha! let him lie there till the greedy gleds pick his bones to pieces! Well—come what may, I have had no hand in this!' he continued, thinking doubtless of the charge of No. 5 aimed at Captain Elliot.

Roland had often goaded Hawkey to the verge of madness by his cool, haughty bearing and unassailable scorn, even at times when the latter secretly amused him by the 'society' airs he strove to assume; but Hawkey's time for vengeance seemed to have come unexpectedly and all unsought for; and in fancy still he seemed to glare gloatingly down into the dark chasm where the pale sufferer lay in his peril, doubtless with many a bone broken, and the waters of the burn rising fast, for the rain was falling in torrents, and there was a spate in all the mountain streams.

Hawkey threw off his soaked coat, invested his figure in a loose, warm robe de chambre, and took a bottle of his favourite 'blend' from his private cellarette, after which he threw himself into an easy-chair, with his feet upon another, and strove to reflect.

'I always thought, if I could get rid of that fellow Lindsay by fair means or foul, this place would certainly be mine, unless Deb plays the fool—mine! The girl in my way is nothing, yet I may have her too, and if not, the other one with the yellow hair. After what I saw by a gleam of the Macfarlanes' lantern to-night, the way seems pretty clear now!'

He tugged his straw-coloured moustache, and after fixing his eyes with a self-satisfied glare on vacancy for a full minute, rang the bell for supper imperiously.

Mr. Hawkey Sharpe was one who never troubled himself about the past, and seldom about the future; his enjoyment was in the present, and the mere fact of living well and jollily without having work to do.

Just then he was pretty full of alcohol and exultant hope—two very good things in their way to lay in a stock of. He cared little what he did, but he dreaded greatly discovery in any of his little trickeries.

To him the world was divided into two portions, those who cheat and those who are cheated.

'Rid of Lindsay,' was the ever-recurring thought; 'rid of his presence, local influence, and d——d impudence, I shall have this place again more than ever to myself, if I can only throw a little dust in Deb's eyes, and have, perhaps, my choice of these two stunning girls when I choke off that other snob, Elliot.'

Excitement consequent on this most unlooked-for episode at the Cleugh had nearly driven out of his mind the object which had brought him that night to Earlshaugh, and his last potations of hot whisky toddy at The Thane of Fife, a tavern or roadside inn on the skirts of the park, had for a time rather clouded his intellect, without, however, spoiling his usually excellent appetite.

Thus when Tom Trotter arrived with a large silver tray—a racing trophy of the late laird's career—covered with a spotless white napkin, and having thereon curried lobster, mutton cutlets, devilled kidneys, and beef kabobs on silver skewers, with a bottle of Mumm, he drew in his chair and made a repast, all the more pleasantly perhaps that he heard at intervals the clang of the great house bell overhead, and saw the lanterns of the searchers like glow-worms amid the storm of rain and wind, as they set forth again on their bootless errand, and then a smile that Mephistopheles might have envied spread over his face.

'Lindsay lost!' he muttered jocularly. 'Well, there was mair lost at Shirramuir when the Hielandman lost his faither and mither, and a gude buff belt that was worth them baith.'

He had a habit, when liquor loosened his tongue, of soliloquizing, and he was in this mood to-night.

'Now, how to raise the ready!' he muttered, as he thrust the silver salver aside, and drew the decanter once more towards him, together with his briar-root and tobacco-pouch. 'The money I have lost must go to a fellow who is said to possess the power of turning everything he touches to gold—to gold! Gad, could I only do that, I wouldn't even sponge on old Deb in Earlshaugh, or wait for a dead woman's shoes. Besides, if I don't please her, she may hand over the whole place to the Free Kirk; and, d—n it, that's not to be thought of!—that body which, as she always says, seceded so nobly, and scorned the loaves and fishes. If I could only get hold of Deb's cheque-book; but she keeps everything so devilish close and secure! When a fellow comes to be as I am,' he continued, rolling his eyes about and lighting his pipe with infinite difficulty—'bravo!—there's a devil of a gust of wind—hope you like it, Lindsay—when a fellow, I say, comes to be as I am, with an infinitesimal balance at the banker's and not much credit with his tailor, he can't be particular to a shade what he does—and so about the cheque-book——'

'What have you been doing now?' asked a voice behind him.

His sister Deborah again! He grew very pale and nearly dropped his pipe. 'How much had she overhead?' was his first thought; 'curse this habit of thinking aloud!' was his second.

'You are always stealing on a fellow unawares, Deb,' said he, in a thick and uncertain voice; 'it is deuced unpleasant—startles one so.'

Her face was pale as usual; but her eyes and mouth expressed anger, pain, and a good deal of indignation and contempt too.

'What have you done?' she demanded categorically.

'Nothing,' said he, striving to collect his thoughts; 'but made my way here in a devil of a shower, for want of other shelter.'

'You know what has happened?'

'To Lindsay—yes.'

'You do?' she exclaimed, making a step forward, with a hand on her side, as if her usual pain was there.

'I know that he is absent—missing—that is all,' he replied doggedly.

'Nothing more?'

'Nothing more—and care little, as you may suppose,' he replied, avoiding her keen searching eye by carefully filling his pipe. 'There is always some row on,' he grumbled; 'what a petty world this is after all—I wonder if the fixed stars are inhabited.'

'That will not matter to you, I should think.'

'Why?'

'You will go some other way, I fear.'

'Deb, your surmise is unpleasant.'

The manner of Hawkey Sharpe to his sister had lost, just then, much of its general self-contained assurance. She detected the change, and it rendered her suspicious.

'Save this poor little dog Fifine,' said she, caressing the cur she carried under an arm, and which was greedily sniffing the débris of Mr. Hawkey's supper, 'I do not know a living creature who really cares for me!'

'Oh—come now, Deb—hang it!' said her brother in an expostulatory manner.

'You have some object in coming here to-night,' said she sternly; 'to the point at once, Hawkey?'

'Well, since you force me, Deb—I have been unfortunate in some speculations.'

'Is it thus you describe your losses on the race-course?'

'At the western meeting—yes—backed the wrong or losing horse—Scottish Patriot—devil of a mess, Deb!'

'And lost—how much? An unlucky name.'

'Two thousand pounds—must have the money somehow—I'm booked for it, and you know the adage—

"A horse kicking, a dog biting,
A gentleman's word without his writing,"

are none of them in my way.'

'I know nothing of the adage, but this I know—there are bounds to patience.'

'My dear Deb!' said he coaxingly.

'I have lost much—too much, indeed, through you—money that might be put to good and holy uses—and now shall lose no more!'

Turning abruptly, she swept away and left him.

He looked after her with absolutely a red glare of rage in his pale gray eyes.

'Good and holy uses—meaning the kirk of course!' he muttered with a savage malediction. 'We shall see—we shall see. She must have heard me muttering about her cheque-book—ass that I am; but that money I must have before three months are past if I rake Pandemonium for it!'

Again the clanging of the house bell fell upon his ear, and he heard the storm as it rose and died away to rise again. He took another glass of stiff grog and glared at the great antique clock on the mantel-shelf.

'Three in the morning,' he muttered. 'It must be all over with him by this time—all over now!'

CHAPTER XXII.

PELION ON OSSA.

The rain and the wind were over; the storm had passed away into the German Sea, as perhaps more than one luckless craft found to its cost between Fife Ness and the shores of Jutland.

It was over in the vicinity of Earlshaugh; the sluices of heaven seemed to have emptied themselves at last; but the atmosphere, if clear, was damp and laden with rain, and the masses of ivy, rent and torn by the wind, flapped against the walls of the old manor-house.

The hour was early; bright and clear the morning had come from the German Sea, and a freshness lay over all the fields and groves of the East Neuk. After such a terrible night there seemed something fairy-like in such a morning with all its details, but the excitement was yet keen in Earlshaugh.

The horse-chestnuts still wore their changing livery of shining gold, and the mountain ash looked gray, but lime and linden were alike nearly stripped of their leaves; and when the breeze blew through the old oaks of the King's Wood the pale acorns came tumbling out of their cups—the tiny drinking-cups of the freakish elves that once abode in the Fairy Den.

Old Jamie Spens, the ex-poacher, now came with startling tidings to Earlshaugh. A shepherd's dog—one of those Scottish collies, of all dogs the most faithful, intelligent, and useful, as they can discover by the scent any sheep that may have the misfortune to be overblown by the snow, had been seen careering wildly in the vicinity of the rocky Cleugh, disappearing down it, to return to the verge barking and yelping loudly, as if he had evidently discovered someone or something there.

Old Spens had looked down, and too surely saw the young laird lying pale, still, and motionless.

'Dead?' asked a score of voices.

'After sic a nicht and sic a fa' what could ye expect?' said the old man with tears in his eyes as he remembered Roland's kindness to himself, adding, as he shook his grizzled head, 'but I hope no—I hope no.'

Spens had found Roland's gun, and a golden pheasant, dead, near the edge of the Cleugh, for which a party at once set out in all haste, Hester and Maude, pale and colourless after such a sleepless night, too impatient to wait for the pony phaeton which Jack Elliot offered to drive, preceding them all, for the scene of the catastrophe was at some distance from the house.

'They laugh longest who laugh last,' muttered Hawkey Sharpe to himself, as—while pausing on the brow of an eminence beyond the Weird Yett—he saw this party setting forth, a large group of servants and keepers with poles and ropes—and he shook his clenched hand mockingly and threateningly as he added, 'do your best, but

                '"In the midst of your glee,
You've no seen the last o' my bonnet and me!"'

Annot did not accompany this excited party; it might be that her strength was unequal to it at such an hour and over such ground, or it might be that she had not heart enough for it. There is no secret of the latter, says a French writer, that our actions do not disclose; and as Annot's heart seemed—well, Hester Maule cared not then to analyze it; she was too disgusted to be angry.

But Annot, in all her selfish existence, had never before been, as she thought, face to face with the most awful tragedy of life—Death—and she shrank from the too probable necessity now.

So she remained behind with Mrs. Lindsay. She was not accustomed to such rough weather and such exhibitions; she would get her poor little feet wet; she was subject to catching cold; the morning was full of rain and wind—it was still quite tempestuous—such was never seen in London; so Maude and Hester swept away in contemptuous silence, leaving her, well shawled and cowering close to the fire in Mrs. Lindsay's luxurious boudoir, and thought no more about her, as she remained motionless, silent, and with her eyes certainly full of tears, fixed on the changing features of the glowing coals, and seeing her hopes of Earlshaugh too probably drifting far away in distance, now!

Could this calamity be real? was the ever-recurrent thought in the mind of Hester. It seemed too fearful—too horrible to be true! Was she dreaming, and the victim of a hideous nightmare, from which she would awake?

With all their impatience and anxiety to get on, the keepers, servants, and others stepped short in mistaken kindness or courtesy to the two young ladies who accompanied them; but in an incredibly short space of time the yawning Cleugh was reached, where the shepherd's faithful dog was still on guard, bounding to and fro as they approached, barking and yelping wildly; and with hearts that beat high and painfully—every respiration seeming an absolute spasm—Hester and Maude, who clung to Elliot's arm, reached the verge of the chasm, and on looking down saw too surely—as something like a wail escaped the lips of each—Roland lying at the bottom, still and motionless, half in and half out of the burn's rocky bed, as he, by the last efforts of his strength, had painfully dragged or wrenched himself.

Exclamations of commiseration and pity were now heard on every hand.

'This way, lads—round by the knowe foot,' cried old Gavin Fowler.

'No—by the other way—the descent is easier!' said Elliot authoritatively; but heedless of both suggestions, Hester Maule, like the gallant girl as she was, took a path of her own, and went plunging down the very face of the rocks, apparently!

A cry of terror escaped the more timid Maude, as Hester seemed to stumble and fall, or sway aside, but rose again and, trembling, sobbing violently, in breathless and mental agony, her delicate hands, which were gloveless, now torn and bleeding by brambles and thorns, her beautiful brown hair all unbound and rolling in a cascade down her back, finding footing where others would have found none, grasping grass and heather tufts; while the more wary were making a circuit, she was the first to reach him, and kneel by his side!

Raising his head, she laid her cheek upon his cold brow, while her tears fell hot and fast, and for a moment she felt that this helpless creature was indeed her own, whom even Annot Drummond could not take from her then.

How pale, cold, sodden, and senseless he seemed! With a moan of horror that felt as if it came from her wildly beating heart, Hester applied to his lips a tiny hunting flask of brandy with which she had, with admirable foresight, supplied herself, and almost unconsciously he imbibed a few drops.

'Roland!' said Hester, in an agonized voice.

A litter flicker of the eyelashes was the only response.

'Thank God, he lives!' exclaimed the girl.

'Annot, Annot!' he murmured.

'Always—always the idea of chat girl!' sighed Hester bitterly, and she withdrew her face from its vicinity to his as Elliot, Gavin Fowler, Spens, and others came splashing along the bed of the stream from two directions, above and below the Cleugh, and ample succour had come now.

What his injuries were, whether internal or external, or both, none could know then. He seemed passive as a child, weak and utterly exhausted. To all it was but too apparent that had succour been longer of coming it had come too late; but now there was no lack of loving and tender hands to bear him homeward, and into his father's house.

'Annot's name was the first word that escaped his lips,' said Hester, as with torn and tremulous fingers she knotted up her back hair into a coil, and seemed on the verge of sinking, after her recent toil, and under her present excitement and anxiety.

'That girl has been his evil genius—his weird—I think,' said Maude, who never liked Annot, and mistrusted her; 'and he will never be free so long as this weird hangs on him.'

'She, a Drummond! The town-bred coward!' exclaimed Hester, her dark violet eyes flashing fire, while she coloured at her own girlish energy.

'The sooner she changes it to some characteristic one like Popkins or Slopkins the better,' said Maude; 'but I think she would prefer Lindsay.'

'Telegraph to Edinburgh at once for Professor —— and Dr. ——,' said Mrs. Lindsay, naming two of the chief medical men (as Roland was carried up to his room), and evincing an interest that surprised Maude, and for which her brother, Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, would not have thanked her.

'I'll see to that myself,' said Jack Elliot, betaking himself at once to the stable-yard that he might ride to the nearest railway-station, and meantime send on to Earlshaugh the best local aid that could be obtained in hot haste.

Roland's injuries were serious undoubtedly, but not so much so as had been feared at first.

These were a partial dislocation of the left thigh bone and a strain of the right ankle, both of which bade fair to mar his marching for many a day; with a general shock to the whole system consequent on the fall (which, but for the turfy ledge of rock that broke it, would have proved fatal) and the exposure to the elements for a whole autumnal night of storm and rain. But with care and nursing, the faculty—after pulling him about again and again till he was well-nigh mad, after much tugging of their nether lips, as if in deep thought, consultations over dry sherry and biscuit, and pocketing big fees in an abstracted kind of manner—had no doubt, not the slightest doubt, in fact, that with his naturally fine constitution he would soon 'pull through.'

A crowd of people always hovered about the gate-lodges; women came from their cottages, weavers, perhaps the last of their trade, from their looms, and the ploughmen from their furrows to inquire after the health of the young laird, for such these kindly folks of the East Neuk deemed Roland still, for of the mysterious will they knew little and cared less; horsemen came and went, and carriages, too, the owners with their faces full of genuine anxiety, for the Lindsays of Earlshaugh were much respected and well regarded as being among the oldest proprietors in a county that has ever been rich in good old historical families; and the veteran fox-hunting laird had been a prime favourite in the field with all his compatriots. So again, as before, during Jack Elliot's mishap, the bell of the porte-cochère sent forth its clang in reply to many a kind inquiry.

And many agreed with Maude that none in Earlshaugh were likely to forget the unfortunate shooting season of that particular year, as this calamity seemed to surpass the last. It was grief upon grief, like the classic piling of Pelion on Ossa.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

A TANGLED SKEIN.

Natheless the fair promises of the faculty, Roland Lindsay seemed to hover between life and death for days. They were a time of watching, hoping, and fearing, and hoping again, till every heart that loved him grew sick with apprehension and anxiety.

At first he looked like one all but dead; the great charm of his face lay in the earnest and thoughtful expression of his eyes, and in their rich brown colour; both were gone now, and the clearly cut and refined lips, that denoted a brave, gentle, and kindly nature, were blue and drawn; and a slight sword cut upon the cheek, won at Kashgate, looked rather livid just then.

He was exhausted, languid, and passive, but, at times, seemed to awaken into quickened intelligence; then anon his mind would wander a little, and the names of Hester and Annot were oddly mingled on his feverish tongue.

But there was great joy when he became sensible of the perfume of flowers—the sweetest from the conservatory—culled and arranged by the loving hands of the former, in the vases that ornamented his room, and when he fully recognised the latter in attendance upon him.

'My little wife—my child-wife that is to be,' he whispered, 'you love me still, though I am all shattered in this fashion?'

Then Annot caressed his hand, and placed her cheek upon it.

Guests had all departed, the key was turned in the gun-room door; the dogs were idle in their kennels, and only Elliot, Hester, and Annot remained as visitors at Earlshaugh. The great house seemed very silent now; but Roland, as strength and thought returned, was thankful that the guests he had invited were gone. The difficulty of their presence had been tided over without any unpleasantness (save the affair of Elliot and Sharpe), and now he felt only a loathing of his paternal home, with an intense longing to be gone—to get well and strong—to keep well, and then go, he cared not where at first, so that Annot was with him, and then back to the regiment as soon as possible, even before his leave was ended.

Annot was now—unlike the Annot who cowered over the boudoir fire on the morning when Roland was rescued—most effusive in her expressions of regard and compassion, though she was perhaps the most useless assistant a nurse could have in a sick room, the air of which 'so oppressed her poor little head;' and thus she was secretly not ill-pleased when her services there were firmly, but politely, dispensed with by old Mrs. Drugget, the portly housekeeper, who had nursed Roland and his dead brother many a time in their earlier years, and now made herself, as of old, mistress of the situation.

Annot's bearing on the eventful morning referred to rankled in the memory of Maude and Hester. They strove to dissemble and veil their growing dislike to, and mistrust of, her under their old bearing and cordiality of habit; but almost in vain, despite her winning, clinging, and child-like ways and pretty tricks of manner. These seemed to fall flatly now on ear and eye, and soon events were to transpire with regard to that young lady which gave them cause for much speculation, suspicion, and positive anger.

She was soon sharp enough to discover that there was a growing cloud between them, and took the precaution of giving a hint thereof to Roland. She was somewhat of a flirt, he knew very well; but there was no one in the house to flirt with, now that Malcolm Skene and all the others were gone; and he had consoled himself with the reflection that she was devoted to him, and that her little flirtations had been of a harmless nature, and the outcome of a spirit of fun and espièglerie.

And if Hester and Maude were somewhat disposed to be severe on Annot and reprehend this, he knew by experience that ladies who adopt the rôle of pleasing the opposite sex are rarely appreciated by their fair sisters.

Mrs. Lindsay when she visited Roland from time to time, as he thought to watch his progress towards health and departure, felt thankful, though of course she gave no hint thereof, that her brother had at least no active hand in the misfortune that had befallen him.

'The guests I somewhat intrusively invited here are all gone, Mrs. Lindsay,' said he on one occasion, 'and I shall soon relieve you, I hope, of the trouble my own presence gives you.'

'Captain Lindsay—Roland—do not talk so,' she replied, either feeling some compunction then for the false position of them both, or veiling her old constitutional dislike of him, which, Roland cared not now. Calm, cold, self-contained, and self-possessed, Mrs. Lindsay, as usual, was beautifully and tastefully dressed in rich black material, with fine lace lappets over her thick, fair hair, and setting off her colourless and lineless face. Her expression, we have said elsewhere, was not ill-tempered but generally hard and unsympathetic, and now it was softer than Roland had ever seen it, and something of a smile like watery sunshine hovered about her thin and firm lips, and to his surprise she even stroked his hair with something of maternal kindness as she left him, pleased simply because he had uttered some passing compliment to the effect that he was glad to see her looking so well and in such good health. But she and Maude were not, never were, and never could be, friends.

'I should like to know precisely the secret of this prison house,' thought the observant Annot, as she saw this unusual action.

If a 'prison house,' it suited her tastes admirably; but she was fated to learn some of the secrets thereof sooner perhaps than she wished.

A month and more had passed now; Roland was becoming convalescent; he could even enjoy a cigar or pipe with Jack Elliot, and had been promoted from his bed to a couch in a cosy corner of his room; and he felt that now the time had come when he ought to break to Annot the true story of how monetary matters stood with him at Earlshaugh.

A heavy feeling gathered in his heart as this conviction forced itself upon him—a sensation as of lead; yet he scorned to think that he would have to cast himself upon her generosity, or ask for her pity.

Compared with what might and ought to have been, his prospects now were, in many respects, gloomy to look forward to; but he had fully taken breathing time before breaking to her news which, he greatly feared, might be testing and grievously disappointing.

But it would be unmanly to trifle longer with Annot, or dally with their mutual fate. Yet how was he to preface the most unwelcome intelligence that he was no longer—indeed, never was—laird of that stately mansion and splendid estate, with all its fields, wood, and waters?

How he dreaded the humiliating revelation—yet why so, if she loved him?

Taking an opportunity when they were alone, and the two other girls, escorted by Elliot, had gone for a 'spin' on horseback, he drew her tenderly towards him, with one arm round her slender waist and one hand clasping hers, which still had his engagement ring on a baby-like finger, while gazing earnestly down into her sunny eyes, which were uplifted to his with something of inquiry in them, he said:

'I have news, darling—terrible news to reveal to you at last.'

'News?' she repeated in a whisper.

'Of a nature, perhaps, beyond your imagining,' said he in a voice that became low and husky despite its tenderness.

'What do you mean, Roland? You frighten me, dearest!'

He pressed her closer to him, and she felt that his hands were trembling violently.

'Annot, I have a hundred times and more heard you say that you loved me for myself, and would continue to love me were I poor—poor as Job himself.'

'Of course I have often said so, and I do love you; but why do you ask this question now? What has happened? Why are you so strange?' she asked, changing colour and looking decidedly restless in eye and manner. 'Are you not well? How cold your poor hands are, and how they tremble!'

She drooped her fairy-like head, with all its wealth of shining golden hair, upon his shoulder, and looked upward keenly, if tenderly, into his downcast eyes.

'Has any new calamity occurred to distress you?'

'Nothing that is new—to me.'

'Why, then—

'It is this. I am not Lindsay of Earlshaugh—not the owner of the estate I mean. I am poor, poor, Annot, yet not penniless; I have my old allowance and my pay—but this beautiful estate is not mine.'

'Not yours?'

'No—not a foot of it—not a tree—not a stone!'

Her lips were firmly set, and the rose-leaf tint in her delicate cheeks died away.

'Whose, then, is it?'

'My father—weakly—my father——'

'To whom did he leave the property?' she asked, lifting her head from his shoulder and speaking with a sharpness he did not then notice; 'is it as I have heard whispered?'

'To my stepmother—yes. You knew of that—you suspected it, my darling?' he added, with a sudden access of hope and joy—hope in her unselfishness and purity of love.

She made no immediate reply.

'Is this unjust will tenable?' she asked, after a time.

'It is without flaw, Annot. My father left her all he possessed, with the power of bequeathing it to whom she pleases, without hindrance or restriction.'

'Cruel and infamous! And who, my poor Roland, is her heir?'

'That reptile, Hawkey Sharpe, I presume.'

Something between a gasping sigh and a nervous laugh escaped Annot, who said, after a little pause, during which he regarded her fair face with intense and yearning anxiety:

'I thought you as prosperous a gentleman as the Thane of Cawdor himself; but this is terrible—terrible!'

And as she spoke there was something in her tone that jarred painfully on his then sensitive and overstrung nerves.

Annot assured him of her unalterable love, whatever lay before them—whatever happened or came to pass—was he not her own—her very own! She wound her arms about his neck; she caressed him in her sweet, and to all appearance, infantile way, striving to reassure him; to soothe, console, and implant fresh confidence in his torn and humbled heart; but with all this, there was a new and curious ring in her voice—a want of something in its tone, and erelong in her eye and manner, that stung him keenly and alarmed him.

What did this mean? Did she resent his supposed duplicity as to his means and position? But he consoled himself that he would soon have her away from Earlshaugh, with all its influences, associations, and the false hopes and impressions it had given her, and then she would be his own—his own indeed.

'How loving, how true, gentle, and good she is! Do I indeed deserve such disinterested affection?' were his constant thoughts.

He disliked, however, to find that Annot had begun to cultivate the friendship of Mrs. Lindsay—"Deb Sharpe" as she was uncompromisingly called by Maude, who was always on most distant terms with that personage; and to find that she was ever in or about her rooms, doing little acts of daughter-like attention such as Maude, with all her sweetness of disposition, had never accorded; even to fondling, feeding, and washing her snarling pug Fifine; and Mrs. Lindsay, of whom other ladies had always been rather shy, and towards whom they had always comported themselves somewhat coldly and with that cutting hauteur which even the best bred women can best assume, felt correspondingly grateful to the little London beauty for her friendship and recognition.

The splendour of the house, the richness of the ancient furniture and appurtenances, the delicacies of the table, the attendance, the comfortable profusion of everything, had been duly noted and duly appreciated by Annot, and she felt that it was with sincere regret she would quit the fleshpots of Earlshaugh.

More than once, when promenading about the corridors with the aid of a stick, Roland had surprised her in tears.

'Tears—my darling—why—what!' he began.

'It is nothing,' she replied, with a little flush. 'I am oppressed, I suppose, by the emptiness and size of this great house. I am such an impressionable little thing you know, Roland.'

'We can't amend the size of the house,' said he, smiling, 'but a cosier and a smaller one awaits us elsewhere, when you are my dear little wife, and we quit this place, once so dear to me, as I never thought to quit it in disgust—for ever!'

Seeing the varying moods of Annot, and the occasional petulance, even coldness, with which she sometimes ventured to treat Roland now, Hester, remembering that young lady's confidences with reference to Mr. Bob Hoyle and other 'detrimentals,' her avowed passion for money, and how a moneyed match was a necessity of her life, and knowing Roland's changed position and fortunes—Hester, we say, was not slow in putting 'two and two together,' to use a common adage, to the detriment of Annot in her estimation.

'I would that I were a strong-minded woman,' said the latter reproachfully, as she and Roland lingered one evening in a corridor that was a veritable picture gallery (for there hung the Lindsays of other days, as depicted by the brushes of the Jamesons, the Scougals, De Medinas, Raeburns, and Watsons in the striking costumes of their times), and Roland had been taking her a little to task for some of her petulant remarks.

'A strong-minded woman,' he repeated. 'Nonsense! But why?'

'Then I should cease to annoy you, and join an Anglican Sisterhood, to nurse the poor and all that sort of thing.'

She pouted prettily as she spoke—sweetly, with all her softest dimples coming into play.

'Are you not perfectly happy, Annot?'

'Oh, yes—yes!' she exclaimed, and interlaced her fingers on his arm; yet he eyed her moodily, and lovingly, ignorant of the secret source of her discontent or disquietude.

'How can I take her to task,' thought he; 'already too! so fair, so bright, with her hair like spun gold!'

He tried to catch and retain her loving glance, but the corners of her pretty mouth were drooping, and her eyes of pale hazel looked dreamily and vacantly out on the far extent of sunlit park and the white fleecy clouds that floated above it; but he thought he read that in her face which made him long for health and strength to take her away from Earlshaugh to the new home he had now begun to picture, and seldom a day passed now without something occuring to increase this wish.

'Roland,' said Maude on one occasion, as she drove him out through the pleasant lanes in her pretty pony phaeton, 'that odious creature Hawkey Sharpe is still, I understand, hovering about here.'

'Bent on mischief, you think?'

'Too probably.'

'Well, I am powerless to prevent him. He is, you know, his sister's factotum and now all but Laird of Earlshaugh.'