'"I shall be so glad to row you further next time."
'"You talk as if you expected to see me again—as if it were quite a matter of course."
'"I can only hope to do so," said I, handing her ashore and retaining her little, ungloved hand, lingeringly in mine; "but I row past here every day, at the same hour."
'"Good-bye," said she, about to turn away.
'"May I ask your name?" said I, cap in hand.
'"Annabelle Erroll."
'"Why do you start so?" she asked laughingly, and, tripping up the bank, vanished among the white stems of the silver birches, leaving her ferns in the boat behind her.
'Start! Well might I do so; for I now discovered that she was my cousin, the daughter of a widowed maternal Aunt Annabelle, with whom my parents had ever been at enmity, about some money quarrel, with her husband, Colonel Erroll—an aunt whom I had never met, and of whose existence I had but a vague idea.
'My cousin she was, and proud, greedy old Uncle Erroll's daughter! I would rather not have heard this; for the girl's rare beauty attracted me powerfully on one hand, while the transmitted stories of the family feud—stories which in boyhood made me regard the colonel and his wife as an ogre and ogress—on the other, had a fatal effect upon me.
'That her mother yet kept up the feud, was evident from the circumstance that she had never mentioned to Annabelle the fact, which she must have known, that I commanded the Lancers at the barrack within a few miles of their own house. Yet to have done so would have served no end; though I thought not of that.