She felt that--as a wedded wife--she must stand alone in her secret grief, and beyond the pale of human succour or sympathy, and the sweet words of 'Auld Robin Gray' occurred to her:
'I daurna think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin.'
Times there were when she dreamt of Evan vividly, and that he was with her again. 'Why should it be a miracle that the dead come back?' asks an author; 'the wonder is that they do not. How can one go away who loves you and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle; not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back and those who have left us return.' At such times he seemed near to her, and his voice was in her ears--more near to her than he had ever been. He loved her, but he was gone--gone, and the grey day was stealing slowly in!
Olive, she thought, she must see Olive; doubtless Allan must have written home to her, and his letters might contain some details of this catastrophe that she would learn nowhere else, so she contrived a visit to Puddicombe Villa at Southsea on their way to Hurdell Hall. But she gained nothing by this.
Lady Aberfeldie had heard of the late event in Egypt, and saw in a moment how it had affected her daughter.
'She is a very sensitive girl, Sir Paget,' said she, deprecatingly, in reply to a somewhat stinging remark of his; 'and thus you see the sudden death of this young man, so recently our guest at Dundargue, and so long her brother's tried friend and comrade, and one to whose courage that brother and all of us owe so much, has--not unnaturally, I think--greatly shocked her.'
'Shocked her rather too much, apparently,' jerked out Sir Paget, with a grimace. 'Who could have supposed that so brief an acquaintance--shall we call it an acquaintance?--could have produced an impression so deep.'
Lady Aberfeldie bridled up a little and crested her handsome head; for, like Sir Paget, she had her own thoughts on the subject.
'Well, he is gone now,' said she, after a pause.
'And a devilish good thing, too,' added Sir Paget, roughly.
She made no rejoinder, conceiving that the less that was said on the matter the better.
Eveline found Olive in a very crushed state.
Allan had never written to her, and, as yet, even his mother's letter of explanation had not been replied to. Perhaps he did not believe in it. He had left her abruptly and passionately and with a sore heart. Many such hearts are caught by others on the rebound, for the void in them is more easily filled up, and often requires to be so.