'Then how about Paul and Virginia? They knew each other all their lives, and yet loved each other tenderly.'
'Or desperately, rather, Hester; but that was in an old story book greatly appreciated by our grandmothers.'
'Instead of talking nonsense here, I really think you should go home, Roland,' said the girl, with a tone of pain and pique at his nonchalant manner; 'home for a time, at least.'
'To Earlshaugh?'
'Yes.'
'Are you tired of me already, Hester?'
'Tired of you, Roland?—oh, no,' replied the girl softly, while playing with the petals of a flower.
The speakers were Roland Lindsay, a young captain of the line, home on leave from Egypt, and his cousin, Hester Maule, a handsome girl in her eighteenth year; and the scene in which they figured was a shady, green and well-wooded grassy bank that sloped down to the Esk, in front of the pretty villa of Merlwood, where he swung lazily in a net hammock between two beautiful laburnum-trees, smoking a cigar, while she sat on the turf close by, with a fan of peacock feathers in her slim and pretty hand, dispersing the midges that were swarming under the trees in the hot sunshine of an August evening.
While the heedless fellow who swung there, enjoying his cigar and his hammock, and the charm of the whole situation, twitted her with her unconcern, Hester—we need not conceal the fact—loved him with a love that now formed part of her daily existence; while he accorded her in return the half-careless affection of a brother, or as yet little more.
At his father's house of Earlshaugh, at his uncle's villa of Merlwood, and elsewhere, till he had joined his regiment, they had been brought up together, and together had shared all the pleasures and amusements of childhood. In the thick woods of Earlshaugh, and along the sylvan banks of the Esk, in the glorious summer and autumn days, it had been their delight to clamber into thick and leafy bowers—vast and mysterious retreats to them—where, with the birds around them, and the flowers, the ivy, and the ferns beneath their feet, they wove fairy caps of rushes and conned their tasks, often with cheek laid against cheek and ringlets intermingled; and in their days of childhood Roland had often told her tales of what they would do and where they would go when they became man and wife, and little Hester wondered at the story he wove, as it seemed impossible that they could ever be happier than they were then. He always preferred her as a companion and playmate to his only sister Maude, greatly to the indignation of that young lady.