'Well—the best.'
'The best—how, Miss Hurdell?'
'Well—he was so old and you so young, don't you see,' replied this very matter-of-fact person.
Free—for whom and to what extent? Eveline never viewed the dispensation of Providence thus; but till Olive came with her soothing presence, every night amid the darkness of her room, the pent-up tempest in her bosom—the tempest of unavailing regrets—would burst forth with loud whispers and sobs till sleep came, as it always did, at last.
Before Olive arrived, Lucretia was ever by the bed-side of her 'sweet Eveline,' sitting for hours together, putting Eau-de-Cologne on her handkerchiefs and Rimmel on her temples, arranging her pillow or her footstool if she left her couch for a chair, telling her stories of foreign life at Naples, Homburg, and Monaco, and so forth, for she believed that Eveline had been left with a splendid jointure, and a Scottish estate by a former lover; while Sir Harry lounged about impatiently in the stables and kennels, with his briar-root, and thinking 'when will all this end? And how can she go on as she does about that old pump?'
But a little time before Eveline had been unconscious of any special blessedness in her life; now—with regard to the fate of her brother and Evan Cameron—it seemed as if the restoration of the past, even while encumbered with captious, fretful, and jealous old Sir Paget, would be worth years of happiness.
'Oh, my brother—my brother Allan? Were there not wicked people enough in the world to be taken, that you must be reft from us?'
And these words found a terrible echo in the heart of Olive. More weary and empty than ever did life look to both, these girls. Everyone seemed to have some one to love them—some object in life to engross them—but neither of them had any now.
'If I could only die—if I could only die!' Eveline would murmur, as she tossed her sweet face and dishevelled hair on her pillow, and thought of that grave in the desert, and betrayed a frame of mind beyond the conception of mundane Lucretia Hurdell.
And her mind would go back to the old days with all their brightness at Dundargue and in Mayfair, before Sir Paget came into the family picture, and when pleasure seemed all her thought and occupation, and care quite beyond her province!