And this was his last night at Eaglescraig; it seemed as if he was looking on everything there for the last time, Mary's pale face included, and the time came at last when he had to say to her:
'Good-night, and good-bye, Miss Montgomerie.
Yet Fate was not so cruel as to make them part thus, for through a skilful manœuvre executed by Miss Erroll—in compelling Hew to hold a folio book of Indian photographs while the general explained to her something therein—as Mary gave Cecil her hand, 'her soft, white virgin hand, that had never touched aught to soil or harden it,' he whispered hurriedly, and unheard by all save her:
'Good-bye. Oh, my darling, my own Mary! How am I to live without you, how make the time pass till we meet again—if ever?'
And eye conveyed to eye and heart, a world that was alike unsaid and unseen.
Courtesy compelled him to shake the damp, limp hand of Hew, and the shifty eyes of the latter looked radiant with malevolence and triumph.
Grey dawn was breaking, and save Mr. Tunley, the butler, and a sleepy valet, all the household were sunk in slumber, when Falconer, after an almost sleepless night, and feeling as if it must be some other person and not himself that was about to depart, got into the dog-cart with his portmanteaus and gun-case.
A cold, chilly morning, the last day of January. The crocus formed a golden band along the parterres of the terrace; a few snow-flakes came aslant the dull grey sky, and the robin redbreast, his little heart filled at least with hope, twittered and sung on the bare spray, where the first buds of spring would soon be bursting. All around the landscape looked dank and barren and dreary—unusually so it seemed to Cecil's eye.
Pate Pastern, a groom, drove the dog-cart. Hew had again flatly declined to do so, saying overnight to Sir Piers that he 'didn't care to drive a fellow like Falconer, a fellow so devilish sharp at cards, and all that sort of thing, you know;' and the general had said approvingly:
'Of course not, of course not, my dear boy.'