Lady Aberfeldie was content and happy; Evan Cameron seemed now a banished man; even Allan never spoke of him, and the progress of matters between the cousins proved all she could desire.
'Nothing could be more fortunate, dearest Olive, than the attachment which now subsists between you and Allan; it fulfils all your father's fondest wishes,' said she, as she met them one day in the garden, slowly promenading between the flowerbeds, Allan leaning, or affecting to do so, on the soft, round arm of Olive.
'Yes, mother dear—I agree with you, and also with Peter Simple,' replied Allan, smiling.
'In what?'
'That the life of a man seems to consist of getting into scrapes, and then getting out of them again.'
'And you forget now that I ever teased and tormented you so, my poor Allan,' said Olive, patting his rather pale cheek with her pinky palm.
'Of course I do, darling. I am not much of a philosopher, but Balzac is right in his view of human life—that it would be intolerable without a vast amount of forgetting.'
'And forgiving, too, he might have added,' said Olive, as she tendered her lips playfully and poutingly for a kiss, which he was not slow in according.
Poor Eveline, as she watched this happy pair daily under her eyes, sighed with natural and irrepressible envy; she thought of her own love for Evan Cameron—secret, ignored, and so liable to excite maternal scorn and bitterness, with paternal reprehension, when it came on the tapis; while even Allan, at all times so loving and so brotherly, amid the great selfishness or absorption of his own passion, seemed, as she thought, to have withdrawn his sympathy from her now.
One circumstance she deemed most fortunate—Parliament was sitting, and Sir Paget Puddicombe was in London.