'I would I were that pigeon,' said he, sentimentally.
'"Would I were a glove upon that hand!"—now don't be a goose and attempt to act Romeo, as I cannot be your Juliet,' said Mary, laughing outright; and now he began to eye her with his gloomiest expression in his parti-coloured orbs, while she caressed the bird, and sang, as if to it, part of Lady Anne Lindsay's song:
'"Why tarries my love? Ah, where does he roam?
My love is long absent from me.
Come hither, sweet dove, I'll write to my love,
And send him a letter by thee.
'"Her dove she did deck, she drew o'er his neck
A bell and a collar so gay;
She tied to his wing a scroll with a string,
Then kissed him and sent him away."'
Suiting the action to the word, she kissed the pigeon and tossed it from her with a merry ringing laugh, for she had ever a light glad heart, and was full of pretty, yet haughty and winsome ways.
Hew, in the vanity of his nature, could not see how hopeless it was for him to press his suit with a girl who never listened to him seriously, and who never tried, even in the least degree, to care for him; for there was something in Hew Caddish Montgomerie that made Mary totally indifferent to all he could urge, and so she felt neither regret for, nor gratitude to him: thus she could hear unmoved the avowal and proposal from his lips, which seldom fail to stir in one way or another the hearts of most women, and which, whoever utters them, are seldom or never forgotten.
'Let us be friends, Hew,' said she, in reply to another appeal; 'I do not love you—I cannot love you as you wish, and I dare not and would not marry where I did not love.'
Hew eyed her still more gloomily and almost revengefully, while she played with the spray of a wild-rose tree, till a little cry escaped her, as a thorn entered her delicate hand.
'Do permit me, Mary,' he urged, and tenderly enough he extracted the thorn, and bowing over her hand, pressed it to his lips; but Mary almost angrily snatched it away, just as the sound of wheels was heard, and there bowled up the winding avenue a dog-cart, the driver and the occupant of which must have seen, and no doubt misunderstood, the whole situation.
'Our new guest with his gun-case and portmanteaus,' said Hew, with much annoyance.