'Yes,' she replied, wincing, as he laid his coarse hand rather roughly on her delicate shoulder.
'He is dead--he is dead--and perhaps it is a sin to brood over the past.'
'An infernal futility, at all events. All this is pleasant for me, madam,' said he, applying himself to polishing his pate again.
A wiser man might have partly ignored the affair, in the hope that it must in time pass away; but her unmistakable emotion of grief for Cameron's death proved somewhat beyond the patience of Sir Paget, who recurred to it warmly.
'His demise, if untimely, is very natural; to face death and meet it was the trade he chose, and for which the country paid him, and well, too, as we shall find by next year's income-tax. What more would you have? Others quite as good as he--better perhaps--have fallen in this grotesque war, which, the Ministry tell us, is no war at all, though it will be deuced expensive work to us who have to stump-up for it,' he continued, waving his hand as he had done when addressing the same words to his constituents at Slough-cum-Sloggit. 'Moreover, madam, we can only die once, which is just as well. Who is it that likens the race of man to leaves on the trees?'
'But the leaves fall in autumn, not as he has done--my--my----'
'Love?' he suggested, with a gloomy sneer.
'No,' replied Eveline, quivering with anger.
'My dear friend--my brother's comrade, and the saver of his life at Tel-el-Kebir.'
For some days the matter was not referred to; Sir Paget sulked a good deal, and dined often with his friend Hurdell at the club, while Eveline, in her dumb grief, felt like some piece of strange machinery that must go through the evolutions for which it was framed.
To Sir Paget she was an enraging enigma. Dead or alive, what was this Highland fellow now to her? But 'who,' asks a writer, 'in middle age, when the sordid cares of every-day life are paramount, can comprehend the young heart's passionate mystery--the love which, like some bright tropical flower, buds and blooms in a single day--the love which is more than fancy!'
But a fresh impetus was given to Sir Paget's jealous anger, and a keen edge put upon it, when a letter addressed to 'Lady Puddicombe' arrived one morning from Messrs. Horning and Tailzie, W.S., Edinburgh, anent 'the will of the late Evan Cameron, Esq., of Stratherroch,' informing her that by that document, he had bequeathed his estate of that name to her and her heirs, whom, failing, to those of his brother Duncan. The letter then proceeded to detail the encumbrances on the estate, which was rapidly freeing itself; that besides so much arable land there was fine grouse-shooting, extending to about eight thousand acres, yielding in favourable seasons about nine hundred brace of birds, besides black-game, snipe, ducks, and plover; that there was excellent trout-fishing in the river Erroch. It then described the mansion-house, stables, kennels, and so forth, and wound up by asking for 'her ladyship's instructions.'