'Which certainly exist so far in our case. I am the heir of Earlshaugh, yet is Earlshaugh mine? At the present moment,' he added, with his teeth almost set in anger, 'congratulations might be embarrassing.'
Maude sighed for her brother's future, but not for her own. That seemed assured. She thought that if the fashion of congratulations prevented promises of marriage being lightly given, they served a purpose that was good. She had read that a girl might say yes 'when asked to marry, with the mental reservation that if anything better came along she will continue not to keep her word and think twice about it if she has to go through such a form' (and such a girl she shrewdly suspected Annot to be). Maude also thought that marriage engagements are frequently too lightly entered into and too lightly set aside, and that the contract should be as sacred as marriage itself.
'You surely know Annot well?' said Roland, breaking a silence that embarrassed him.
'Oh yes,' replied Maude, without looking up.
'I think you will learn to like, nay, must like her!' he urged.
'I shall try, Roland,' was the dubious response, with which he was obliged to content himself as with other things in his then Fool's Paradise.
CHAPTER XVII.
AT EARLSHAUGH.
For two or three days before the all-important First of September, Roland, the old gamekeeper, Gavin Fowler, young Malcolm Skene, and even the pardoned poacher Jamie Spens, had all been busy in a vivid and anxious spirit of anticipation as the day approached. Many a time had they reconnoitered by the King's Wood, the Mains of Dron, in the Fairy Den, and elsewhere, till they knew every rood of ground—ground over which Roland's father had last rambled on his old shooting pony—by stubble field, hedgerow, and scroggy upland slope, where the coveys of the neighbourhood lay, and knew almost the number of birds in every covey; and many a time and oft the route of the first day was planned, schemed out, and enjoyed in imagination; while the dogs were carefully seen to in their kennels, and the guns and ammunition inspected in the gunroom, as if a day of battle were at hand.
Yet, even in the Lowlands of Scotland, the palmy days of shooting are gone in many places never to return. Muirland after muirland has been enclosed, marshes reclaimed, and in other parts the hill slopes, that were lonely, stern, and wild—often all but inaccessible—have now become the sites of villas, mansions, and new-made railway villages, till people sometimes may wonder what Cowper meant in his 'Task' when he wrote—