'Oh, Sir Paget, do you really mean to marry a woman who does not and never can love you?'
'Do not say "never can." How can we know what the future may have for me—for us, my dear girl?'
'Who, indeed, save One!' sighed the girl, wearily.
'I would rather have half your heart than the whole of any other woman's,' said Sir Paget, gallantly, while recapturing her hands, and jerking out his head in turtle fashion.
'My whole heart,' thought Eveline, 'is—oh, no—was full of Evan, but can have no vacant corner for any other, especially such a man as this.'
And even while she thought this she shivered as if with cold, when in right of his new position he caressed her.
'How, with all their innate pride, papa and mamma are content to abandon me to this absurd little man Puddicombe, as they do, passes my comprehension,' said she to Olive. 'Puddicombe—such an absurd name too,' she added, with a little laugh that was hysterical; 'and what object can the splendour of his settlements be to them? They seem to ignore the fact that the Grahams of Dundargue were barons of the Scottish Parliament when the ancestors of half the British peerage were hewers of wood and drawers of water—peasantry and artisans!'
So in the bloom of her youth and beauty, the time 'when the light that surrounds us is all from within,' Eveline Graham was to become a victim at the altar after all—after all!
And Cameron seemed to have prepared the path for her, for, stunned by his too apparent duplicity, she schooled herself for the rôle of indifference to fate; but this was chiefly by day, for often at night she would lie where she had thrown herself, across her bed, forgetting even to undress, her tear-blotted face covered by her soft arm, and so in the morning the wondering and sympathising Clairette would find her.
June was creeping on now, with its sunny, fragrant breath; there were white and purple blossoms in the parterres of the garden; the graceful laburnums were dropping their golden petals in showers over the rosebuds and green lawns that were bordered by dark shining myrtles and deep-tinted laurels and rhododendrons.