'_Friends!_' he exclaimed, in a low voice of reproach, bitterness, and rage curiously mingled.
Resolute to act out the scene to the last detail, she slowly drew her engagement ring off her finger--like the marriage ring, the woman's badge of servitude according to the old English idea, but of eternity with every other people, past or present--laid it on a table near him, and gliding away without another word or glance, they separated, and Roland stood for a minute or so as if turned to stone.
Then, like one in a dream, he found himself walking slowly to and fro, forgetful even of his temporary lameness, on the terraced path beneath the towering walls of the old house.
The engagement ring--how tiny it looked!--was in his hand, and with something like a malediction he tossed it into a sheet of deep ornamental water that lay thereby, and there too, perhaps, he would have tossed all the other beautiful and valuable presents he had given her; but these the fair Annot did not as yet see her way to returning, and, sooth to say, he never thought of them.
So--so he was 'thrown over' for one who seemed most suddenly and unaccountably to have come upon the tapis, but chiefly because he was a kind of outcast--a disinherited man. Had she not told him so in the plainest language?
The situation was a grotesquely humiliating one.
'Oh, to be well and strong and fit to march again!' he sighed.
In the expression of his dark eyes there was now much of the bitterness, keenness, and longing of a prisoner looking round the cell which he loathed, and from which he desired to be gone; and more than once, in the solitude of his room, he closed his eyes and rested his head upon his arms, as if he wished to see and hear of his then surroundings no more.
Even the caresses of Maude--even Hester's gentle voice and soft touch failed to rouse him for a time.
Some days elapsed before Roland--after thinking over again and again all the details of this most singular episode, the strangest _crisis_ in his life--could realize that it was not all a dream, and that the relations between himself and Annot had undergone such a complete revolution that their paths in life must lie apart for ever, now.
But he was yet to learn the more bitter sequel to all this.