'Poor Evan!' said Allan, as he wrung the hand of Cameron, whose head sank forward, so much was he overcome by emotion; 'I am glad of this explanation, but it comes too late—if indeed it could ever have served any purpose so far as your hopes with Eveline are concerned. In three days she is to be married—and now, let us talk of the subject no more.'
But for a time black fury gathered in the heart of Cameron at Sir Paget Puddicombe, whose deductions, however, from all that he saw at the railway station, were most natural.
'In three days,' he muttered again and again, 'in three days, and she will be lost to me for ever!'
Eveline as yet was ignorant of her lover's purity and innocence, nor would the knowledge of it have availed her much. There was a meek abandonment of her own will—of her own judgment, and Lady Aberfeldie caressed her more than she had ever done before, glad to find that she had become—my lady cared not why or how—compliant at last.
She seemed quite passive and supine—resigned, Olive phrased it—and ready to do her mother's bidding, for Evan Cameron seemed to have quite passed out of her life, though the name 'Alice' he had uttered seemed to be ever in her ears.
She heard her mother speaking, and felt her caresses, but her eyes were suffused by a kind of mist. Yet more than once she had started amid her apathy, and thought, 'Why am I still here—why don't I run away to where they will never find me?'
But she had no determining motive to decide her choice of place or scheme of life, though she felt that ere long, when these last three days were past, she would have to reconstruct her entire future, and from that future her heart recoiled and shrank. Her temples throbbed as she thought of this; her heart seemed alternately to thunder in her breast, and then to become unnaturally still.
Again and again her mother told her that she would be surrounded by such wealth as falls to the lot of few; but she cared not for wealth, nor would it ever remove her gloomy and bitter reflections, and at the very name of her intended husband, though she evinced no emotion, a secret and involuntary shudder came over her.
Society was intolerable just then, and she had much of it at Maviswood. How intolerable seemed lawn-tennis amid the bright sunshine, the soft thud of the balls upon the racquets, as they were shot over the nettings from court to court, the laughter of young and sweet voices, and the cries ever and anon of 'fifteen,' 'thirty,' 'fault,' and so on, as the jovial game progressed; and with evening came the inevitable dinner-party, and at night the dance.
Allan, fearing to lacerate his sister's heart, knew not how to undeceive her in the matter of Cameron's supposed duplicity, though the truth or falsehood thereof could not affect her fate or her relations with Sir Paget now; but the true story escaped Carslogie quite casually when in conversation with Olive, who in due time related it to Eveline, in whose breast it created some very mingled emotions.