'What is next?' he muttered, as he opened a little basket and laughed. It contained sandwiches and sherry, peaches, grapes, and a little bouquet of hot-house flowers, all selected, he knew, by the white hands of Hester.
'Poor girl!' he muttered; 'does she think I am bound, not for Earlshaugh, but for Alexandria?'
He had beautifully-coloured photos of both girls in his pocket book—one of Annot, smiling, saucy, and arch, with her laughing eyes and golden hair; and one of Hester, with her calm, sweet expression, her dark, beseeching, and pleading eyes, and hair of rich dark brown; but he had one of the former's fair tresses—not the first of them that Annot had bestowed on 'Bob Hoyle' and others that he knew not of. But so it is—
'Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.'
Merlwood had vanished as the train sped on, and, away from the immediate influence of Annot, softer memories of Hester began to mingle upbraidingly with the idea of the former, and—as he thought it all over again—the past; he recurred mentally to many a loving and half-ended episode, to Hester's winning softness, her pleading, truthful eyes of violet blue, and he felt himself, though uncommitted by pledge or promise, inexpressibly false!
It was not a pleasant reflection or conviction even while caressing Annot's shining tress of hair—his tempter and her supplanter.
Some men, it has been said, when they form a new attachment, try to teach themselves that the old one contained no true love in it. This was not the case with Roland, nor could he be a man to love two at once, though some natures are thought to be capable of such an idiosyncrasy.
At last he was roused from his mingled day-dreams by his train clanking into the Waverley Station, and he saw Edinburgh, the old town and the new, with gables, spires, and tower-crowned rocks rising on each side of him, with a mighty bridge of round arches high in air spanning the space between.
The day was yet young, so he idled for a time at the United Service Club with Jack Elliot, his comrade in Egypt, on leave like himself, and now his sister Maude's fiancé, a fine, handsome, and soldier-like young fellow, of whom more anon—full of such earnest love and enthusiasm for the girl of his unwavering choice, that Roland—reflecting on his late proceedings at Merlwood—felt his cheek redden more than once, as well it might, and an involuntary sigh escaped him, though he could little foresee the future.
So full was he of his own thoughts, that it was not until he was landing on the Fife side of the Forth that he reflected with annoyance: