'Always, Bevil—for ever and for ever—and—and,' she added, smiling shyly through her tears that mingled love, joy, and something of terror caused to well up in her beautiful eyes, 'you will take this from me (I brought it on purpose), poor Ellon's ring—the ring you wore so long without knowing whose face and hair were hidden in it.'
'It was an omen of what was to come, love Alison—an omen that we were to meet, and that you should be mine—mine only!' he replied, embracing her with ardour.
They had now become a little more composed and a little more coherent.
'I have expectations, of course—every fellow has,' said Bevil Goring, as they wandered on slowly hand in hand; 'but mine are perhaps too remote to suit the views, and may be opposed to the ambition, of Sir Ranald; yet I love you so dearly, so desperately, darling, that if you will wait for me only a year—I ask no more—I shall hope to claim you publicly or set you free. A captain with only a hundred or two besides his pay could scarcely hope to wed your father's daughter, Alison. Let our engagement be a secret one, as you dread an open one. It is not honourable in me to tie you thus, but what can I do? Separation now would be a kind of death to me; and oh, Alison, I love you so!'
'And I you, Bevil;' then she added, in a broken voice, 'We have had great sorrow, great trouble, we Cheynes, and they have made papa what he is; but I can remember when things were very different, when we were not so poor as we are now, and when he—poor old darling!—had much more of life and spirit in him.'
And so, while replying to Bevil's downward glances of love and tenderness, she pressed closely to his side, with her fingers interlaced upon his arm, in the assured confidence of their mutual relations to each other, as they sauntered towards a more sequestered part of the coppice.
Let the dark future hold what it might of severance, tears, and futile longings, for that fleeting time Bevil was hers and she was his—his own!
And so they parted an engaged pair, he not at all foreseeing, and she only fearing, the gathering cloud that overhung them both. Her elderly admirer was in London then. Parliament was sitting, and she, freed from his visits, abandoned herself to the full enjoyment of the present.
She now wore a new ring, a handsome diamond hoop with a guard, upon the third finger of her left hand; but this was unnoticed by Sir Ranald, though it did not escape the sharper eyes of Mrs. Trelawney, who more than once caught her young friend toying with the trinket—turning it to and fro round her slender finger, while regarding it with a sweet, loving, and dreamy expression of face which told its own tale.
But, if Mrs. Trelawney was reticent on the subject of her suspicion, Alison was still more so, and locked her secret in her own breast.