So here were a couple bound together by the strongest of all the legal ties, yet utterly unsuited to each other by age, thought, and habits; yet most punctilious was poor Eveline in the performance of every wifely duty she owed her captious old man; but a sickly dread of coming sorrow pervaded the girl's mind every morning she quitted her pillow, and it came sharply and surely at last.
To dare to look at a newspaper was sufficient to worry him.
'So, so,' he would say; 'thus it is--is it? Egypt and the Black Watch. D--n the Black Watch, I say! Where is the affection that you as a good woman----'
'I am only a girl,' she urged, piteously.
'As a good woman, say I, should feel for her husband after marriage, even if she felt none of it for him before that little ceremony--for little and trivial doubtless it may appear to you, madam--and your regard for me should be all the deeper and more lasting that no vain protestations preceded it.'
Eveline made no response, but resumed her occupation of gazing listlessly from the back window of the drawing-room into one of those dull and flowerless London gardens which a writer has truly described as looking 'like a burial place without any graves;' so Sir Paget returned to the charge.
'It is said, when love fails to beget love, it often engenders hatred. Is it so, madam?'
'Not in our case, I hope,' said Eveline, wearily, as she sighed, and her slender foot in its satin shoe began to tap the carpet with nervous impatience. 'Why did you marry me--buy me from papa?' she asked, with a tone and bearing a little unusual in her, she was ever so gentle and meek.
'I married you because I admired your beauty, and believed in the love that would come after marriage--the love that is grounded not on childish fancy, but on tried friendship and esteem.'
'Then you believed in too much,' said Eveline, driven desperate.
'Too much?' he repeated, changing colour, and jerking his head forward.
'Indeed! I asked you to be my wife in full assurance that I should never find my confidence in you misplaced.'
'You asked mamma rather, and your confidence has not been misplaced.'
Then she paused and coloured deeply for the first time, as she recalled that painful and passionate interview in the belvidere at Maviswood, and Evan Cameron's farewell glance; two episodes that seemed to have happened years ago.