'Have you anything more unpleasant to say to me, Roland?' she asked.
'Only that I begin to wish, Annot—oh, my God—that we had never, never met!'
'Indeed! Good-bye.'
'Good-bye.'
She swept away. What a change—was it witchcraft?—had come ever the once playful, childlike, and winning little Annot! Roland's heart was sick and crushed, and he began to have a growing and unpleasant suspicion that he had made, as he thought, 'a confounded fool of himself.'
'Thank Heaven, Hester! I shall soon have the sea rolling between me and this place,' said he, when, after a time, he told his cousin, the early playmate and sweetheart of other days, the story of this interview and his complaint against Annot. 'Regrets are useless; we cannot change the past; but I have neither the inclination nor the capacity to face all the circumstances that seem to surround me in Earlshaugh now.'
'Why has he addressed me in his distress, and on this subject?' thought Hester almost angrily; 'how can I sympathize with him in the matter? And he comes to me at a time, too, when I know we may be soon parted for ever, and when my thoughts are as full of him as they were in that old time that can return no more.'
Piqued at and disappointed with Annot, a curious and confusing emotion came more than once into the mind of Roland—one described by a Scottish writer as feeling 'that had he not, and had he been, and if he could he might—in line, he thought the medley which many a man thinks when he knows that he loves one, and only one; but under suasion and pressure would find it just possible to yield to other distractions.'
Annot did not afford him many opportunities of recurring to their first quarrel or effacing its memory; and from that hour she kept indignantly and sullenly aloof, as much as she could in courtesy do, from Maude and Hester—to their surprise—spending most of her time in the apartments and society of Mrs. Lindsay.
But once again, in the long shady avenue near the Weird Yett, when Maude was idling there, under the cold blue sky of an October evening, with Jack Elliot—idling in the happiness a girl feels when on the brink of her marriage with the man she loves with all the strength of her warm heart—the man whose voice and the mere touch of whose hand gives joy—she felt that heart turn cold when she detected Annot—her brother's fiancée—bidding a hasty adieu to the stranger before referred to—clad in a red hunting coat, and leading his horse by the bridle.