Bound though she was to a husband beyond her years, uncongenial, and, in some points, unappreciative, she could respect him, but she could never love him; that was impossible. Her love was far away, where the shadows of the Pyramids fell on the sands of Ghizeh, and the pipes of the Black Watch sent up their wild war-notes in the desert of Goshen.
She had still the companionship of Olive, who, with her aunt, Lady Aberfeldie, was lingering at Southsea.
'Take care, Eveline,' said the former, warningly, 'lest this useless and hopeless regret for Cameron becomes too apparent to Sir Paget.'
'I cannot help it, however wrong and sinful it may be,' she replied. 'I do my best. I let myself love him from the first moment I met him, and knew that he loved me—loved me well—before the secret escaped him. Many have admired me, but,' she added, simply and sweetly, 'no one ever spoke to me before as Evan spoke, and I gave him all the love of my heart; but to cherish it is, I grant you, hopeless now.'
'Hopeless as mine; for now Allan, I fear, loathes me, if he thinks of me at all,' said Olive.
'I am very tired, Olive,' observed the other girl, 'of trying to compel duty to triumph over sorrow.'
In her soft hazel eyes there was the expression of one who was always looking far away at some horizon unseen by others. Sir Paget was not so dull or so slow as not to perceive all this, and to draw his own deductions therefrom. A change had decidedly come over him since he detected her emotion on the day the Black Watch marched, and he had become captious, fractious, jealous, and inclined to be sneering, while watchful of every expression in her face.
In the library one day she was looking at a terrestrial globe on a tall and handsome stand. She saw that, as the crow flies, the distance was two thousand five hundred miles at least to where the Black Watch were face to face with the swarthy followers of Arabi; and, stooping, she pressed her lips to Egypt in general.
'He is there—I here! On the globe, how short the distance seems!'
'What are you about, Lady Puddicombe?' said a voice, sharply, behind her—the voice of Sir Paget, who was jerking his bald head forward most alarmingly. 'Kissing a globe!—what tomfoolery—what strange fancy is this?'