A vase of flowers, sent to her but that morning from Sir Redmond by the hands of his valet, was on the mantelpiece. She put her hands towards it mechanically, as if she would have placed it on her window sill in obedience to that pitiful letter; but strange to say the flowers were all dead—already dead and withered!
Why was this?
Something superstitious crept over the girl's heart as she looked on them; she turned away—and the token was not given.
Robert, we have said, watched with aching heart and aching eyes in vain. Had the postscript escaped her notice? It might be so; and to this straw, like a drowning man, he clung. So the day passed on; and Ellinor began to think she had done wisely in not raising hopes only to crush them, and gave herself up to thoughts of Sir Redmond, and the secret contemplation of his beautiful gift.
Sir Redmond had poured into her ear much of love, of passion, of admiration, and so forth, certainly; but even to Ellinor's unsophisticated mind his proposal of marriage seemed a strange one.
Each sister had ample food for her own thoughts. Mary was rehearsing over and over again the cutting of the initials on the tree, and the manner of Colville to herself. If he really was engaged to Blanche Galloway (of which she had no positive proof), it was not flattering to either of them; yet the expression of his eyes seemed ever sweet, candid, and honest; and she gave fully her confidence to Ellinor.
The latter, who had never a secret to keep from her sister before, felt with shame and compunction that she had one now—one of vast importance to them both; but Sir Redmond had bound her to secrecy for a little time, and she could but trust; so fondly she thought over that scene in the conservatory—his proposal, a dazzling one, for would she not one day be Lady Sleath, proud, wealthy, and independent of all the world?
Even her parents, who were lying in their graves, with all their love of her, had never in their proudest and most exultant moments pictured for either of their children a future like this!
So she seemed to live in an enchanted world, out of which the figure of Robert Wodrow faded. 'Once in our lives,' says a writer, 'Paradise opens for all of us out of the dull earth, and moments, golden with the light of romance, shine upon us with a radiance like unto no other radiance of time, and we do not stay to count the cost of the bitter desolation that follows. For Eve herself would scarcely have surrendered one memory of Eden for all the joys to be found upon earth.'
Colville, when in the solitude of his own room, overlooking the woods of Craigmhor, was full of his own thoughts, some of which were not very pleasant, as he was dissatisfied with himself. He had a little plan he wished to carry out, as we shall show in time, and he felt perhaps that he was acting foolishly. He had come from London with the Dunkeld family, who evidently expected more from him in regard to Blanche than he had yet evinced, and the rumour of their engagement was a false one.