James Grant

“ To Olive the whole situation was one of miserable unrest; she felt that there was something grotesque in it, and she longed intensely to be anywhere else than at Dundargue.
While Allan, admiring her rare beauty and pretty, petulant ways, was already learning to love her, he found his tongue loaded, as it were, tied up, and his tenderness cramped by the strange tenor of her father's will, which made him feel that, love her as he might, that love would never seem pure, or without the taint of selfishness. ”

“ Now Cameron had once more to give place to pudgy little Sir Paget, who—puffing out his chest and jerking forward his bald shining head—began to do his best to make himself pleasing to Eveline, while the latter, under her mother's watchful eye, was compelled to listen and appear to act with compliance and complacency; and poor Eveline, like Olive, often felt with some compunction that her mother's general bearing—which a certain quiet yet lofty dignity seemed never to forsake—was more calculated to inspire respect than love. ”

“ Though not very impressionable by Nature, Holcroft, influenced by the good things he was imbibing, said something about the beauty of the scenery, to which Lord Aberfeldie responded, adding, with a laugh,
'I do enjoy life in a shooting-box, and of all the entrancing sports to me there is none like stalking the deer.'
With his sodden knickerbocker suit drying slowly upon him in the mountain wind, Holcroft could only assent to this faintly, and wished, perhaps, that, like Stratherroch, he wore a kilt, and could wring the water out of the plaits thereof. ”

“ The new emotions of her heart caused Eveline to reflect more than perhaps she had ever done before. It seemed but yesterday since she and Olive conned their tasks and practised their scales together under the eyes of a governess; since they had gathered bouquets of wild flowers from the clefts of the rocks of Dundargue, and made fairy caps of rushes and harebells by the burnside; happy children both; but how miserable she was now that she was on the verge of womanhood, and had learned to love and to hate ”

“ Lord Aberfeldie, his son, and Stratherroch, as they wore the kilt, had, of course, substituted for their rough shooting-jackets others of black cloth, with the irreproachable white vests and ties as evening costume, and had also assumed their silver-mounted dirks; while Holcroft and one or two more were de rigueur in the funereal attire, which a writer calls 'the butler-suit, the most hideous clothing yet hit upon by our species.'
In that brilliant drawing-room, grouped with well-bred people, were some curious elements of secret doubt and future discord that did not quite meet the eye. ”

“ Allan drew a long breath, while his dark eye seemed to flash along the barrel, and fired. Bang went a couple of rifles in the distant corrie, but Aberfeldie and his son took no heed of them. The latter's single shot had sped true, piercing the stag above the left eye, and now it lay prone on the heather, tearing up tufts and sandy earth with its hoofs in the agonies of death. ”

“ If it be true, as Madame be Stael asserts, that 'love occupies the whole life of a woman,' it need not be a matter of surprise that the sex can discover each other's love secrets with ease; thus, though Lady Aberfeldie fully suspected what filled the heart of her daughter—so closely had she watched her—she was somewhat pitiless now.
With all her queenly manner and soft grace, her unexceptional toilettes and suavity of manner, Lady Aberfeldie had a will of iron, yea, of adamant in some things, and her daughter's marriage with Sir Paget was one of them. ”

“ All is lovelier when with thee.'
And it was not unnoticed by Lady Aberfeldie that at the closing word of each verse the eyes of the pair unconsciously met. Ere Eveline could be prevented, she had acceded to Cameron's softly uttered desire that she would sing anything for him; and she frankly did so, throwing into her voice the thrill and tenderness that are sure to come into a girl's utterances when singing to the man she loves. ”

“ But we all make mistakes in life, and require at times each other's pity and forgiveness.'
How sweetly and shyly she looked and spoke.
Hawke Holcroft felt intuitively, and indeed saw, that there was some sudden change in the bearing of the pair to each other, and that a sudden brightness had come into the faces of all—even that of Eveline, usually now so triste and pale—and under his sandy moustache he 'wondered what the devil it all meant,' till his watchful eyes detected the new and brilliant ring on the engaged finger of Olive Raymond! ”

“ And now at luncheon, inspired by a few bumpers of Clicquot, Sir Paget's glances at Eveline took occasionally the fashion of grotesque and languishing leers.
The wealthy baronet was older than she by a great many years, but they by no means warranted him being safe from a love, or passion rather, that might prove cruel as the grave—the passion of a middle-aged man for a very handsome young girl, whose parents were fully disposed to further his views and their own. ”

“ The moment it was over, and he handed her back to a seat, Holcroft took refuge in the refreshment-room, where Mr. Tappleton gave him a foaming glass of sparkling champagne.
Young Cameron was rather grave, Allan thought, but the former was oppressed by one idea then, that on the morrow he would have to report himself at the headquarters of the Black Watch, and he gazed like one in a dream at the dancers whirling round him; so Allan took him to task and strove to rally him. ”

“ Allan Graham, with all his quiet and growing love for Olive, seeing how she received him, neither petted her as he was wont to do in his boyhood, nor after a time had attempted any tenderness with her; but trusted to the progress of events and the necessity for fulfilling her father's wish rather than to his own influence or power of persuasion, aware that she could only become the bride of another, penniless, or nearly so, a circumstance which militated sadly against himself. ”

“ She entered the breakfast-room full of the subject, and dressed—so far as lace and blue ribbons went—in a most attractive and coquettish morning costume; but Allan was not there—he was at the stables, no doubt, or at the kennel. How tiresome men were, she thought.
'Good morning, Olive darling! how charming you look—I must positively give you a kiss!' exclaimed the not usually effusive Lady Aberfeldie, touching the girl's cheek with her lips. ”

“ He had a love—a passion for her—in a strange fashion of his own, yet times there were when he almost hated her for fencing with him: and little could the soft, bright beauty, who raised her fine eyes from time to time to his and conversed so laughingly with him, have conceived the conflicting emotions that were concealed in his breast under a smiling exterior, or the shame and agony he was yet to cost her. ”

“ No woman understood the art of dressing better than Lady Aberfeldie, and well was she aware how truly a dainty maize or a coral colour with rich black lace trimmings became her brunette tints, her dark hair and eyes, her pure, yet slightly olive complexion. ”

“ She grew white as a lily on hearing this sentence, clung to a console table for support, and then burst into a torrent of tears, while her father drew her tenderly towards him.
'Be calm, child,' said he, 'we shall give you plenty of time to think about it; marriage is a serious thing at all times.'
Eveline thought it was doubly serious with such a bridegroom, but could only sob, while her mother eyed her gloomily, as she thought this excessive grief and repugnance augured worse for her scheme than indignation or defiance would have done; but poor Eveline was all softness and gentleness. ”

“ It was of that kind peculiar to some parts of Perthshire, where the subordinate hills, rising a thousand feet and more above the valley, are entirely covered with dusky pines, taking away all that appearance of blackness and desolation presented by naked mountain masses, and adding softness and beauty to the landscape, which would otherwise be stern and grim. Nor were the glassy loch and the murmuring torrent wanting there, nor those passes where the mountains approach each other, and make them, like that of Killiecrankie, excel even the famous Vale of Tempe. ”

“ It has been said that 'people for the life of them cannot be said to believe in the love pangs of a man over forty, or of a woman over twenty-nine,' but people may at times be wrong.
The present epoch was rather a trying one to Cameron and Eveline. As she had admitted to Allan, she knew that he loved her with a love unselfish and unspoken; and he felt intuitively that he was far from indifferent to her—knew it by the indescribable, untaught, and nameless signs by which a man learns instinctively that a woman loves him—in a first passion, a most intoxicating conviction ”

“ By this time, greatly to Olive's relief, Eveline and her two swains had overtaken them, and so the matter dropped, though the minds of both, from two points of view, were full of it. She would now have to endure the double annoyance of being daily in the society of a lover who had addressed her as such, and of an intended lover who had scarcely yet approached the subject! ”

“ The forenoon was brilliantly clear, so the deer-stalkers had not the weather to contend with, as that, if untoward, may render all strategy vain.
Lord Aberfeldie and his son were as well aware as their skilled old keeper that in stalking the chief things to regard are the eyes and nose of the deer. His vision, quick as that of an eagle, can detect a human head above a ridge of rock or belt of bracken, and he can scent an intruder on his 'native heath,' if the breeze blows from the former, at a wonderful distance ”

“ A writer says 'there is the beauty of youth, and surely there is the beauty of love, too,' and the latter certainly shone in the soft eyes of Eveline Graham as she caracoled her horse in the homeward ride by the side of young Cameron, and her eyes, which were ever the mystery of that face, had now their sweetest smiles for him. ”

“ And, with the emotions we have described in his heart, Allan, as if the further to play out the game of cross-purposes, in a spirit of pique, doubtless, remained in close attendance on Miss Ruby Logan.
Now the latter was not the heiress of Loganlee, as she had several brothers; but, even had she been so, it would not have enhanced her value in the ambitious estimation of Lady Aberfeldie.
But Ruby was a very handsome girl, with a skin pure, transparent, and delicate as the lining of a shell, while her fine hair was ample in quantity, and of the darkest amber ”

“ Evan looked backwards at the tall and stately pile of Dundargue, on which the rays of the rising sun shone redly, and deep in his heart he envied Carslogie, who was to remain behind for a couple of days' shooting. Yet wherefore should he envy any man while Eveline loved him? ”

“ The shadows of the great old trees under which more than one Scottish king had blown his hunting-horn fell far along the turf, that was green as an emerald and soft as velvet. A semi-transparent haze, mingling with the sunshine, pervaded the Carse land; the smoke of an adjacent village ascended from the hoary orchards around it, and far eastward fell the shadow of the tall and weather-worn keep of Dundargue, with all its tourelles, or Scottish turrets, tinted redly by the rays of the setting sun ”

“ A deer's eye is as keen as an eagle's, and his nose acute as that of a foumart.'
'The first shot shall be yours, Holcroft,' said Cameron. 'I shall reserve my fire. He seems a powerful animal, and, if you only wound him, we may have the devil to pay!'
'Thanks—but how?' whispered Holcroft. ”

“ Olive and Eveline were of an age, and able to sympathise with each other in every thought or fancy. They had grown up together like sisters, Olive, as an orphan, doubtless being the most petted of the two by the household ever since she came a little child to Dundargue, and both were frank, both were open-hearted, and proud of each other's personal attractions ”