'Know what, Roland?' said she, trying to withdraw her hands.
'That I love you,' he was about to say, and would no doubt have said, but that Sir Harry most inopportunely came limping heavily in, so Roland was compelled to pause. The few words that might have changed all the story we have to tell were left unuttered, and next moment Hester was gone.
'He does love me!' she thought in the solitude of her own room; 'love me as I love him, and wish to be loved!'
Long she pondered over the episode and gazed on his gift ere she retired to rest that night. She hoped in time to bind him to her more closely, for she thought he was a man who would love once in a lifetime with all the strength of a great and noble nature.
Sweetly and brightly the girl smiled at her own reflection in the mirror as with deft fingers she coiled up her rich brown hair for the night; while slowly but surely she felt herself, with a new and joyous thrill, to be turning her back upon the past, yet a happy and an innocent past it had been, and that she was standing on the threshold of a new and brighter world of dreams.
At last she slept.
Roland Lindsay had been on the point of declaring his love, but something—was it Fatality?—withheld him; then the interruption came, and the golden moment passed!
Would it ever come again?
But a change was at hand, which neither he nor Hester could foresee.