'Good-bye, nephew,' said Sir Harry, propping himself on a stout Indian cane. 'God keep you from harm, and may every good attend you; but,' he added, his keen eyes glistening angrily through the film that spread over them, 'does your conscience quite absolve you?'

'In what, uncle?'

'What? Why, your conduct to my girl—your cousin Hester,' said Sir Harry, in a low voice.

'Uncle?'

'Did you make no effort when last at Merlwood here to win her admiration, her regard, her love? Did you not simply play with her heart, and deem it perhaps flirting?—hateful word! In all her anguish—and I have seen it—she has never had a word of reproach for you, whatever her thoughts, poor child, may be; but please to think another time, Roland, and not attempt your powers of fascination and to act the lady-killer, lest you crush a heart that might be a happy one.'

Roland felt himself grow pale as he listened wistfully, half mournfully, to these merited but most unexpected remarks from the abrupt old gentleman, to whom he was sincerely attached. Knowing their truth, an emotion of shame, with much of reproach or compunction, gathered in his heart, and he muttered something apologetic—that he had no longer the position or prospects he once had—that Earlshaugh was no longer his—and felt in some haste to be gone, though he was shocked to see that the old man appeared to be suddenly and sorely broken down in health. The Jhansi bullet had worked its way out at last, but left a wound that would neither heal nor close; and hence, perhaps, the irrepressible irritability that led to these reproaches, some part of which reached the ear of Hester, and covered her with the deepest confusion, and made her welcome the moment of Roland's final departure; and then she said:

'Oh, papa, how could you speak as you did? Roland made me no proposal, asked me for no regard, and I gave him—no promise. I have known him, you are aware, all my life, and I do love him very dearly—but as a brother—nothing more,' added poor Hester with a very unmistakable sob in her slender throat. 'You do him injustice—he has not wronged me; but you know well how others have wronged him.'

But her father only resumed the amber mouthpiece of his. hookah, and continued to smoke in uncomfortable silence.

So Roland was gone, and apparently out of her life more than ever now.

Notwithstanding that he certainly had not treated her well at Merlwood, Hester was for a time quietly inconsolable for his departure, which he had taken in a mood of mind rendered so stern and reckless by the episode of Annot, that she pitied him.