'I shall soon have another,' said Maude, with brightness dancing in her eyes of forget-me-not blue.
'Bui I must have this matter out with Annot—ask her to come to me.'
And when Annot came, with all her strange and flower-like fairness of colour and willowy grace, how fragile, soft, and petite she looked, with her minute little face and wealth of golden hair, her bright inquiring eyes, their expression just then having something of alarm mingled with coyness in them!
How could he be angry with her? What was he to say—how to begin?
We say there was alarm in her expression, for she saw near Roland's hand his powerful field-glasses, with which he was in the habit of amusing himself in viewing the far stretch of country extending away to the distant hills. He could also view the park, which was much nearer.
She knew not whom he might have seen there, and the little colour she had died away.
'What is it, Roland?' she asked; 'you wish to speak with me.'
How terrible it is, says someone, to confront direct and apparently frank people! 'To state in precise terms the offences of all those who incur our displeasure would occasion a good deal of humming and hawing, and, it is to be feared, invention on the part of most of us in the course of twelve months. We have wrought ourselves up to the pitch of a very pretty quarrel, and it is dreadfully embarrassing to be called upon to state our grounds for it.'
So it was with Roland. He had worked himself up to a point which he failed just then to sustain, while in her manner there was a curious mixture of the caressing and the defiant; but when she tried some of her infantile and clinging ways, Roland became cold and hard in the expression of his mouth and eyes, though she hastened to adjust the sofa-cushion on which his head reclined.
'You wish to speak with me, Maude said,' remarked Annot, in a low voice, while looking down and somewhat nervously adjusting a flower in her girdle.