Her cousin, Mr Beale, from the city, had spent his holiday very delightfully at Bilberry Hall; he had gone shooting, and fishing also, with Annie; yet, much though he admired her, and could have loved her, he treated her with the greatest respect, condoled with her in her sorrow, and behaved just like a brother to her.
Her somewhat elderly lover was different. Lover he was yet, though now fifty and three years of age, but fatherly and kind to a degree.
“We all have griefs to bear in this world, Annie dear,” he said once. “They are burdens God sends us to try our patience. But your sorrow must soon be over. Do you know, dear, that it is almost sinful to grieve so long for the dead?”
“Dead!” cried Annie. “Who knows, or can tell?”
“Oh, darling, I can no longer conceal it from you. Perhaps I should have told you a year ago. Here is the newspaper. Here is the very paragraph. The figurehead of the unfortunate Wolverine and one of her boats have been picked up in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, and there can remain no doubt in the mind of anyone that she foundered with all hands. The insurance has been paid.”
Annie sat dumb for a time—dumb and dry-eyed. She could not weep much, though tears would have relieved her. She found voice at last.
“The Lord’s will be done,” she said, simply but earnestly.
Laird Fletcher said no more then. But he certainly was very far from giving up hope of eventually leading Annie to the altar.
And now the poor sorrowing lassie had given up all hope. She was, like most Scotch girls of her standing in society, pious. She had learnt to pray at her mother’s knee, and, when mother and father were taken away, at her uncle’s. And now she consoled herself thus.
“Dear uncle,” she said, “poor Reginald is dead; but I shall meet him in a better world than this.”