'Something very unpleasant, I fear; but you know that a man of property—
Hester paused, not knowing very well how to parry the questions of Annot, who had put them to her frequently, and for a few minutes they promenaded together the long flowery aisles of the conservatory in silence.
Hester was so tall and straight, so proud-looking and yet so soft and womanly, her bearing a thing of beauty in itself, her dark velvety eyes so sensitive and sweet in expression that anyone might wonder how Annot Drummond, with all her fair and fairy-like loveliness, had lured Roland away from her, yet it was so.
Now and then, oftener than she wished, there came back unbidden to Hester's mind memories of those happy August evenings at Merlwood, ere Annot came, when she and Roland wandered in the leafy dingles by the Esk, by 'caverned Hawthornden' and Roslin's ruin-crowned rock; and when these memories came she strove to stifle them, as if they caused a pain in her heart, for such haunting day-dreams were full of tenderness, a vanished future and a present sense of keen disappointment.
And she remembered well, though she never sang now, the old song he loved so well, and which went to the air of the 'Bonnie Briar Bush':
'The visions of the buried past
Come thronging, dearer far
Than joys the present hour can give,
Than present objects are.'
And she felt with a sigh that her past was indeed buried and done with.
Honest and gentle, Hester had long since felt that she was unequal to cope with Annot Drummond, or the game the latter played—a damsel who possessed, as a clever female writer says, 'all the thousand and one tricks, in short, by which an artificial woman understands how to lay herself out for the attraction and capture of that noble beast of prey called man;' and Annot was indeed artificial to the tips of her tiny fingers.
'Hester,' said Annot, breaking the silence mentioned, and following some thoughts of her own, 'have you never had dreams—day-dreams, I mean—of being rich?'
'I don't think so.'