'Oh, what madness it is in me to love her as I do, and how wicked if I lure her into loving me! Can I expect her ambitious mother or her calculating father ever to view with favour one so penniless as I am? Would it be honourable in me to profit by her girlish prepossession in my favour, and so preclude her from reaping those advantages of wealth, position, and rank which she is entitled to expect, and to which her parents looked forward? and alas! as the wife of Sir Paget—if such be her fate—poor Eveline will be lost for ever to me.'
His breast felt torn by such thoughts as these; and, sooth to say, it is as often amid the splendour and luxury of life, as amid its squalor and poverty, that some of its bitterest tragedies are acted out.
But now the party began to break up—the ladies to seek their respective apartments, and the gentlemen to adjourn for a time to the smoking-room.
As the two cousins, each so different in her style of loveliness, crossed the great apartment, the soft frou-frou of their long silken dresses seemed to mingle with their soft laughter and silvery voices. Sir Paget jerked forward his head and remarked to his hostess that 'they made a charming picture.'
Each had a sore place in her heart, but there was no appearance of it then.
Though resenting the position in which she was placed, and much inclined to resist it, Olive Raymond—such is female caprice—also resented Allan's having hovered so much about the amber-haired beauty, and, when she bade him adieu for the night, she could not help singing softly, with some point and waggery, as she glanced back at him, the lines of Tennyson's song:
'I know a maiden fair to see,
Take care!
She can both false and friendly be,
Beware, beware!
Trust her not, she is fooling thee.'
But whether she applied the words to herself or Ruby Logan it puzzled him to divine.
Olive and Eveline were of an age, and able to sympathise with each other in every thought or fancy. They had grown up together like sisters, Olive, as an orphan, doubtless being the most petted of the two by the household ever since she came a little child to Dundargue, and both were frank, both were open-hearted, and proud of each other's personal attractions; and now, dismissing their maids, they brushed out each other's shining hair that they might have a quiet gossip together.
'So ends a tiresome night,' said Eveline, shrugging her white shoulders, which shone like ivory in the light of the toilette candles: 'a night when the conversation of everyone seemed of a nature so antagonistic, or as if it was all broken up into wrong duets.'