'Are you not perfectly happy, Annot?'
'Oh, yes—yes!' she exclaimed, and interlaced her fingers on his arm; yet he eyed her moodily, and lovingly, ignorant of the secret source of her discontent or disquietude.
'How can I take her to task,' thought he; 'already too! so fair, so bright, with her hair like spun gold!'
He tried to catch and retain her loving glance, but the corners of her pretty mouth were drooping, and her eyes of pale hazel looked dreamily and vacantly out on the far extent of sunlit park and the white fleecy clouds that floated above it; but he thought he read that in her face which made him long for health and strength to take her away from Earlshaugh to the new home he had now begun to picture, and seldom a day passed now without something occuring to increase this wish.
'Roland,' said Maude on one occasion, as she drove him out through the pleasant lanes in her pretty pony phaeton, 'that odious creature Hawkey Sharpe is still, I understand, hovering about here.'
'Bent on mischief, you think?'
'Too probably.'
'Well, I am powerless to prevent him. He is, you know, his sister's factotum and now all but Laird of Earlshaugh.'
Though possessing no brilliant beauty, the face of the sunny-haired Maude was one usually full of merriment, and capable of expressing intense tenderness—one winning beyond all words; but it grew cloudy and stern at the thought of 'these interlopers,' as she always called them—Deborah Sharpe and her obnoxious brother.