Her cousin laughed, but knew not, perhaps, how truly and prophetically he spoke.
'Did you like my song?' asked Hester, after a little pause.
'What song?'
'Can you ask me? The little chanson of Béranger, that you admire so much.'
'Oh, yes—pardon me.'
'You were thinking of her when you should have been listening to me,' said Hester with an unmistakable flash in her dark eyes, and he felt the rebuke.
'Well—I was thinking, perhaps—but not as you suppose, or say, Hester,' replied Roland, with a little laugh; but a time came when Annot Drummond and her presence proved to be no laughing matter.
Days passed on now; whether it was that Annot was perpetually in the way, or that no proper opportunity occurred—which in the circle of a country house seemed barely probable—Roland did not seek for the 'lost chord,' or seem prepared to resume the thread of the sweet old story that had been dropped so abruptly, and poor Hester felt in her secret heart perplexed and piqued on a most tender point, and would have been more than human had she been otherwise.
On an afternoon the quartette were seated under a spreading beech, the girls idling over their tea, Roland and his uncle smoking, when Annot suddenly proposed a walk to the ruins of Roslin Castle, through the woods. Roland at once rose and offered himself as escort; but Hester, who had already begun to feel herself a little de trop—a bitter and mortifying conviction—professed to have something to attend to, and quietly declined the stroll, on which, with something of an aching heart, she saw the two set forth together.
Archæology was not much in the way of Miss Annot Drummond, she knew; but she also knew that if any ice remained between these two (which was very improbable) it would be surely thawed before that stroll ended, while in assisting her over stiles and through hedges Roland's hand touched that of Annot, or when her skirt brushed him, as they wandered through freshly mown meadows and under shady trees, by the steep, narrow, and rocky paths that lead to the shattered stronghold of the Sinclairs—the glances and touches and hand-clasps, enforced by the surmounting of slippery banks and apparently perilous ditches, where the beautiful ferns grow thick and green; and then the rambling among the ruins that crown the lofty rock and overlook such lovely and seductive scenery.