Alas! it seemed as if his neglect of her was quite accounted for now. She suppressed a great desire to sob aloud, and half drew her engagement ring from her finger. Then, with true superstition of the heart, she carefully replaced it, as she did a locket which contained his likeness, and which she wore in the breast of her dress; but the episode of that day and all it vaguely suggested added sorely to the already sufficient bitterness of the poor girl's governess life.
She knew not that though, in accordance with his recently-acquired wealth and position, his own tastes, and the wishes of friends, Bevil had started a drag and joined the Four-in-Hand Club, he had been baffled resolutely more than once in his efforts to trace her by the well-meaning vicar of Chilcote, and that he was in perpetual anxiety to discover her, and was trusting to hope that her father's death on one hand and his own ample means had removed the barrier that the former had raised between them.
It is the fate of true love apparently never to run like a railway. 'But why that proverbial asperity should be confined to what is true we are unable to say,' writes a novelist, adding, 'For our own part, that eternal smoothness has but little charm; and the ripple which reflects sunshine and shade, bright gleams and darkening clouds in love as in Nature, gives brightness and variety to the prosiest poetry in the world.'
But doubtless Goring and Alison Cheyne were beginning to think that they had endured enough of the darkening clouds that seemed as yet without a silver lining.
CHAPTER XVII.
HUMILIATION.
Had Goring indeed forgotten or ceased to love her? This was the ever-recurring question in the mind of Alison now, and she recalled the lines of the Spanish song, Vanse mis amores, as applicable to herself:
'How could I bear—how bear disdain,
Who not the slightest favour ever
Received without a blush of pain;
How could I bear disdain? O, never!
One hour of absence, swift and brief,
I could not bear—how should I bear
A long and tedious age of grief,
An age of grief, of gloom and fear?
O! I shall die without relief,
For I am young, and—O, sincere.'
If Goring was, as she thought bitterly and repiningly, remiss in attempting to trace her or not caring to do so, as her heart at times began to forebode, she certainly would not and could not throw herself in his way; she could but wait and hope, suffer and endure.
But one day she had an unexpected annoyance to encounter.