'This man Sleath has come to Invermay.'
Ellinor grew pale. There were a few moments' silence, and when Robert Wodrow spoke again his voice sounded strange even to himself.
'I was never half good enough for you, Ellinor—I know that,' said he, humbly, 'yet I will never give you up until—until I hear you are fully engaged to him.'
'Engaged! How your tongue does run on, Robert,' replied Ellinor, with a curious laugh. 'He has never even spoken to me in any very pointed manner; but rather than be worried thus,' she added, with a swelling in her slender throat, 'I must ask you to forget me—do.'
'Men such as I am do not forget so easily, Ellinor.' The angry colour died out of Wodrow's dark face, and, clenching his hands, he muttered under his thick moustache—'Curse him!'
'He would not speak thus, Robert, if it is Sir Redmond you mean. He has seen a great deal of the best of society.'
'And a great deal more of the worst, I suspect,' said her lover, more exasperated by the slightest defence of his supposed rival; but, nerving himself to be calm, he asked—'Am I, then, to suppose that you have not promised your future—the future that I have a right to say was not yours to assign—to this stranger—to this sudden interloper?'
'I have not. But why be so mysterious, tragic, and absurd, Robert?' she exclaimed, with a little gasping laugh that nearly became a sob; for, sooth to say, Ellinor's secret heart upbraided her, and she felt that she was treating the lover of her girlhood and the friend of all her years with duplicity.
'Then,' said he, 'why do you permit attentions that are purposeless to you, and most distasteful to me?'
'Robert, what do you mean?' she asked, plaintively.