'For the depôt?'
'No—for Egypt,' continued Skene, 'so I must be off. Let me have a trap, Roland, that I may catch the up train for the South.'
'This is sudden!' exclaimed several.
'Sudden indeed—but no less welcome,'
'I am so sorry, old fellow!' exclaimed Roland, 'when the birds are in such excellent order, too.'
'I can scarcely realize it,' said Skene, whose thoughts were not with the birds certainly. 'In a fortnight, I shall be again in my fighting kit and in the land of the Pharaohs.'
Ignorant of what had so suddenly transpired, Hester, for whom he looked anxiously and wistfully, was lingering in her room, till the shooting party should have gone forth, unwilling to face Malcolm Skene after the interview of last night, and full of a determination to return at once to Merlwood, to her old life by the wooded Esk, with her silver-haired father, his bubbling hookah, and his Indian reminiscences—oh! how well she knew them all! But Maude, and even the selfish and apparently volatile Annot, regarded the handsome fellow with deep interest, and the lips of the former were white and quivering as she bade him adieu.
'Good-bye, all you fellows;' he exclaimed, when old Buckle came with the trap to the porte-cochère. 'Good-bye, Roland and you, Jack—when shall we three meet again? In thunder and all the rest of it, no doubt. Farewell, Miss Lindsay—Maude I may call you just now—bid Hes—, your cousin, adieu for me, and God keep you all till we meet once more—if ever!' he added, under his moustache.
Another moment he was gone, and no trace remained of him but the wheel-tracks in the avenue.
'Good-bye—good-bye;' it sounded like a dirge in the air of the warm autumn morning.