'How.'
'Well, devilish queer,' said he, as he cut the matter short, and rode away, on which Olive dried her tears, crested up her head, and looked defiant.
'If this tiresome couple, Olive and Allan, continue to pout and sulk at each other,' said Lady Aberfeldie; 'and he should decline to marry her, her money may be lost to us by her twenty-fifth birthday.'
'Unless——' the lord twisted his moustache and paused.
'Unless what?'
'Allan gets himself killed in Egypt,' replied Lord Aberfeldie, grimly.
'Good heavens, do not say such a thing, even in jest!'
And now, perforce of their present situation, a change had come over the two cousins, Olive and Eveline—they never read, studied, sung, rode, or walked together, as they had been wont to do; a blight had come over both their lives apparently.
Eveline only felt a little at ease when Sir Paget was absent from her, and even then she was pestered by his love-letters, which, like those written usually by men of advanced years, were of a grotesquely impassioned nature. 'Attachments at that age are deeper, and less anxiety not to compromise oneself is shown and felt,' says an essayist. 'After fifty, men are often wise enough to vote the writing of love-letters a bore, but some carry on the practice to a very advanced age. Their protestations are then ingeniously flavoured with touches of the paternal, which sometimes entirely mislead the unsophisticated recipients.'
But the mere sight of Sir Paget's caligraphy, and of his heraldic note-paper, having a shield with some mysterious design thereon, and the motto Puddicombe petit alta! (Puddicombe seeks lofty objects), proved always enough for Eveline, who tossed it into the waste-paper basket unread, but torn into minute fragments, while a sigh of weariness and repugnance escaped her.