What was he to do now?
His profession at least was left him. Would he return to his regiment at once, and go to Earlshaugh no more? It was impossible just yet to turn his back on what was once his home. There was Annot, his fiancée; there was Maude, his sister; there were Jack Elliot and other guests; before them a part must be acted as yet—and then—what then—what next?
A bitter malediction rose to his lips, but he stifled it.
Once matters were somehow smoothed over, back to the regiment he should, of course, go, and turning his back on Scotland for ever, try to forget the past and everything!
With incessant iteration the thought—the question—was ever before him how to explain to Jack Elliot and Annot Drummond that he—Roland Lindsay, deemed the heir, the Lord of Earlshaugh and all its acres of wood and wold, field and pasture, was little better than an outcast—admitted there on the sufferances of the sister of that most pitiful wretch, Hawkey Sharpe!
Viewed in every way the situation was maddening—intolerable. With regard to Annot, he could but trust to her love now. Should he ask Maude or Hester to break the matter to her gently? No—that task must be his own.
Most of the hopes of himself and his sister seemed to be based on the goodwill that might be borne them by Deborah Sharpe (how he loathed to think of her as Mrs. Lindsay), and she, too, evidently, was inimical to them both, and under the complete influence of her brother, Hawkey Sharpe.
Amid the turmoil of his thoughts he did not forget to procure as a souvenir of this wretched visit to Edinburgh a valuable bracelet for Annot Drummond, and then took his way—homeward he could not deem it—to Earlshaugh.
He had but one crumb of consolation, that at the last hour his father seemed to have repented the evil he had done him—at the last hour—but too late!
'Not always in life is it possible to unravel the mesh which our fingers have woven,' says a writer. 'Sometimes it is permitted to recall the lost opportunities of a few mistaken hours; sometimes, when all too late, we would willingly buy back with every drop of our heart's blood the moments we have so wilfully abused, and the chances we have so foolishly neglected. But it is too late!'