'Hawke Holcroft knew her people, didn't he?'
'Yes--before he came a cropper altogether. When last I heard of him he was actually a visitor at their place, Aberfeldie, wherever that may be.'
Eveline heard with total indifference that they were to have guests that evening, and with all his admiration of her Sir Paget thought,
'What a fool I was to marry her, knowing or suspecting what I did--that she loved that fellow--loved him first (me she never loved at all) and last, and loves him now, no doubt. They say no woman ever forgets her first love, simply because he was her first. Pleasant for me!'
Like the hero of a recent novel, 'he could not forget that his wife had loved another man better than she ever loved or even pretended to love him. It was her _candour_ he felt most keenly. Had she been willing to play the hypocrite, to pretend a little, he would have been much better pleased.'
She loved Evan still; but it was with a love purified of every sensuous thought, of every earthly hope.
To Sir Paget the story of how Allan's life had been saved at Tel-el-Kebir by Cameron was a source of profound irritation, annoyance, and mortification, as he knew but too well how the event must enhance the latter in the estimation of Eveline, in whose heart gratitude and admiration for high courage would now be added to love. He would rather have heard that the two friends had been shot down together.
With all her secret love for Evan, she was too wise and modest to desire ever to be face to face with him again. She felt that they had parted in the belvidere at Maviswood never to meet again; that henceforward he was as if dead to her; but it was a delicious privilege to hear of him and of his bravery, and that her dear brother owed his life to Evan's courage and Evan's sword.
She felt that a change had come over the tenor of Sir Paget's ways of late, more especially since the episode of Tel-el-Kebir.
Not a day--scarcely an hour--passed over her head in which she was not made to feel keenly the utter want of sympathy that existed between herself and the man to whom she had been married by her parents--sold by them--as in the bitterness of her heart she thought it.
He said sharp things to her, and made bitter asides when Egypt or the war there was casually mentioned, as, of course, it constantly was; he shot many a poisoned arrow; but Eveline never blushed, though she felt a calm, cold scorn at the cruelty and injustice of such conduct.