Speculations were many and endless,
'Some fatality seems surely to attend the shooting here now!' said Mrs. Lindsay anxiously, as she nervously pressed her large white, ringed hands together.
To some of those present the stately dinner, served up in the lofty old dining-room, was a kind of mockery; and Maude and Hester, who dreaded they knew not what, made but a pretence of eating, while the presence of the servants proved a wholesome, if galling, restraint to them; but not so to the irrepressible Annot, who talked away as usual to the gentlemen present, and displayed all her pretty little tricks of manner as if no cause for surmise or anxiety was on the tapis.
The unusual pallor, silence, and abstraction of Mrs. Lindsay, as she sat at the head of the table, while Jack Elliot officiated as host, were painfully apparent to those who, like Hester, watched her.
But she had her own secret thoughts, in which none, as yet, shared!
An attempt had been made to injure Elliot, perhaps mortally, under cover of a blunder—a mishap. Had the same evil hand been at work again?
A cloud there was no dispelling began to settle over all; conversation became broken, disjointed, overstrained, and the cloud seemed deeper as a rising storm howled round the lofty old house, shook the wet ivy against the windows, and grew in force with the gathering gloom of night.
Annot's equanimity amid these influences grieved Maude and annoyed Hester, who recalled her twaddling grief when Roland had been but a few hours absent from her in Edinburgh.
'How can she bear herself so?' said Maude.
'Because she is heartless,' replied Hester; 'and to say the least of her, I never could imagine Annot, with all her prettiness and espièglerie, at the head of a household, or taking her place in society like a woman of sense.'