At that moment she felt a sort of sickening conviction that all was over between her and Bevil, as if she was being torn from him for ever; and, indeed, separation now was nearer than either of them suspected, for cruel events were fated to follow each other fast.
Goring bowed to father and daughter, just touching the hand of the latter as he withdrew. Sir Ranald turned his back upon him and looked through a window; thus Alison had an opportunity to whisper, 'The beeches at eight this evening,' and Bevil left Chilcote with his heart swelling with anger, and smarting under a keen sense of insult and regret.
'Oh, papa, can you forget that he saw Ellon laid in his grave?' she was on the point of saying, while choked with tears, when she suddenly remembered that Ellon's ring was now on Goring's finger, and that the latter's engagement ring was on the third finger of her left hand, where her father, in his abstraction, selfishness, and pre-occupation with monetary affairs, had never even once detected it.
And now, truth to tell, though desperate with poverty, the struggle to keep up appearances, and anger to find his purposes crossed, the old man blushed for himself in having so far forgot what was due to a visitor, a guest, and one gentleman to another, but that emotion was not unmixed with one of satisfaction that 'the affair,' as he thought it, 'between Alison and that fellow was over now and for ever.'
On this day Alison could not dissemble; she cared not to hide her emotion from him, and let the tears of shame and sorrow pour hotly and bitterly down her cheeks, while he looked grimly on, thinking it would 'be all right by-and-by.'
If she were to see Bevil no more, was the girl's constant thought—what would become of her?
The hours in which he had no part lagged fearfully with Alison, and to Bevil, when they met, the minutes seemed to be literally winged. Her whole life had lately been divided into two portions, one when she was briefly with Bevil, and the other when she was not. Their meetings had become necessary, as it would seem, to their very existence, and, were these ended, both would find their 'occupation gone.'
They knew not how they got through their days before they loved each other, and had those delicious stolen meetings to look forward to and look back to, as something sweet, new, and beloved, to con and dream over.
Till the advent of Bevil Goring, how drearily dull her life seemed to have been at Chilcote! It was all very well to cull and arrange bouquets with all an artist's eye to colour and form, to warble the old songs her mother had taught in brighter days at Essilmont and elsewhere, with all that sweetness which she inherited from her, and vary these occupations by attendance on her fowls and other pets, hunting with old Archie for the eggs when the hens had taken to laying under the hedges; turning dresses, cleaning her own gloves, and, while longing for the purse of Fortunatus, striving to make sixpence go as far as a shilling, feeling that darning and mending were her purgatory, and economy the bane of her existence; but into that existence, with the love of Bevil Goring, there had come a ray of brightest sunshine, with a new and hitherto unknown sense of happiness. But, alas! it would seem they were now to be followed by sorrow, and the gloom of a hopeless night which would have no end.
As the afternoon and evening stole on, Alison's heart beat wildly and anxiously for the time of her meeting—too probably the last one—with Bevil, and after a frugal dinner of cold mutton and boiled rice (a menu at which her father made more than one grimace), with old Archie Auchindoir in attendance, solemnly and respectfully, as if it had been some banquet suited to Lucullus, when Sir Ranald began to doze over his bottle of carefully-aired St. Peray 'Hermitage'—most probably the last he possessed—Alison rose softly from the table and stole into the entrance hall, where the hands on the clock dial indicated that the hour was nearly eight.