'His moodiness quite belies the sobriquet of his name—"The Lindsays lightsome and gay;" but here he comes again. Roland,' she added, springing up and kissing his cheek, 'a thousand thanks, darling, for this lovely bracelet you have brought me. It was so kind—so like you to remember poor little me!'
'As if I could, even for a moment, forget,' was his half-maudlin response, while she drew up her sleeve a little way, coquetishly displaying a lovely arm of snowy whiteness, firmly and roundly moulded by perfect health and youth, with the bracelet clasped on her slender wrist; and while turning it round and round, so as to inspect it in every light and from every point of view, she was thinking that when—after the bestowal of so many other valuable gifts—he could bring her a jewel so expensive as this, surely Hester's hints about the will must have been nonsense, or the outcome of jealousy at her—Annot's—success with a handsome cousin, whom she knew that Hester was at least well disposed to regard with interest.
Yet, when she and Roland were together, to Annot's watchful eyes his manner did seem thoughtful and absent at times, and would have caused misgivings but that she thought, and flattered herself, that it was caused, perhaps, by his having to go prematurely to Egypt, like Malcolm Skene.
After Elliot had become convalescent, and Roland, with others, had resumed their guns, and betaken them again to the slaughter of the partridges, all went well apparently for a few weeks. There were gay riding parties in the afternoon to visit the ruined castles at Ceres and the muir where Archbishop Sharpe was slain; to the caves of Dura Den at Kemback; picnics to Creich and the hills of Logie; there were dances in the evening, and music, when Hester's rich contralto, Elliot's tenor, Maude's soft soprano, and Roland's bass, took principal parts.
'Young hearts, bright eyes, and rosy lips were there;
And fairy steps, and light and laughing voices
Ringing like welcome music through the air—
A sound at which the untroubled heart rejoices.'
Life seemed a happy idyl, and that of Annot—we must suppose that she had her special dreams of happiness too—was ever gay apparently; but Roland's soul was secretly steeped in misery!
Circumstanced as he knew himself to be, Annot's frequent praises of Earlshaugh and her delight with all therein galled and fretted him, and made him so strange in manner at times that the girl, to do her justice, was bewildered and grieved; and Hester, though she wished it not nor thought of it, was in some degree avenged.
'What can be the meaning of it?' was often Annot's secret thought.
Like Elliot and Maude, to her it seemed that perhaps they were too happy for commonplace speeches as they idled hand-in-hand about the grounds, wandering through vistas of thick and venerable hawthorn-hedges, away by the thatched hamlet, through the wooded haugh, where the 'auld brig-stane' still spanned the wimpling burn, while face turned to radiant face, and loving eye met eye.
In such moments what need had they, she thought, for words that might seem dull or clumsy? 'But, after all, words, though coarse or clumsy, are the coin in which human creatures must pay each other, and failing in which they are often bankrupts for life.'