She had loved him,
and believed in his love. She had fancied a tender meaning in the voice
which softened when it spoke to her, a pensive earnestness in the dark
eyes which looked at her; but just when the voice had seemed softest
and sweetest, the pensive eyes most eloquently earnest, the
adventurer's manner had changed all at once, and for ever. He had grown
hard, and cold, and indifferent. He had scarcely tried to conceal the
fact that the girl's companionship bored and wearied him. He had yawned
in her face, and had abandoned himself to moody abstraction when
accident obliged him to be alone with her. Miss Paget's pride had been
equal to the occasion. Mary Anne Kepp would have dissolved into tears
at the first unkind word from the lips of her beloved; but Mary Anne
Kepp's daughter, with the blood of the Cromie Pagets in her veins, was
quite a different person. She returned Mr. Hawkehurst's indifference
with corresponding disregard. If his manner was cold as a bleak autumn,
hers was icy as a severe winter; only now and then, when she was very
tired of her joyless existence, her untutored womanhood asserted
itself, and she betrayed the real state of her feelings--betrayed
herself as she had done on her last night at Foretdechene, when she and
Valentine had looked down at the lighted windows shining dimly through
the purple of the summer night. She looked back at the past now in the
quiet of the school-garden, and tried to remember how miserable she had
been, what agonies of despair she had suffered, how brief had been her
delights, how bitter her disappointments. She tried to remember what
tortures she had suffered from that wasted passion, that useless
devotion. She tried to rejoice in the consciousness of the peace and
respectability of her present life; but she could not. That passionate
yearning for the past possessed her so strongly. She could remember
nothing except that she had been with him. She had seen his face, she
had heard his voice; and now how long and weary the time might be
before she could again see that one beloved face or hear the dear
familiar voice! The brightest hope she had in these midsummer holidays
was the hope of a letter from him; and even that might be the prelude
of disappointment. She wrestled with herself, and tried to exorcise
those ghosts of memory which haunted her by day and wove themselves
into her dreams by night; but they were not to be laid at rest. She
hated her folly; but her