Cadbury's fancy for her was a peculiar one. It was not love, we have before said; not that his day for what he thought that sentiment to be, was past, 'because,' as a writer says, 'till the grave has closed over him, it is impossible to say of any man that his day for that, or its _fac-simile_, infatuation, is finished.' All his life he had been engaged in _affaires du cœur_--affairs more or less coarse; but never before had he found a girl of such refinement, beauty, and character as Alison Cheyne thrown by the mere force of circumstances almost on his mercy; and now, after all the trouble he had taken, the expense of taking up the bills collected by Solomon Slagg, her aversion and resistance piqued and perhaps exasperated him, and he longed for the time when he should feel that he triumphed over and humbled her, he cared little how. 'How long--oh, Lord!--how long is this life of weariness and anxiety to last and be endured?' It was Alison who said this, in a whisper to herself, as she sat in the half-lighted room, in which her father lay a-bed, ill, and sick, and faint, his head still suffering from the blow he had received on the night of the collision--a blow that nearly gave him concussion of the brain, and might yet prove serious at his years, and with his now broken constitution. He lay in the plain but not unluxurious bed-room of a Belgian hotel--the St. Antoine. The walls were lofty, papered with sage-green paper; the bare and uncarpeted oak floor was varnished and polished like the face of a mirror; a cheerful fire was in the square black iron stove that stood in front of the carved oak mantelpiece, whereon was an elegant French clock, above which rose a lofty mirror, and on each side of which were large vases full of flowers, arranged by the hands of Alison--chiefly roses, which at that season are brought all the way from Nice to Antwerp--by railway, of course. She heard the carillons sounding pleasantly in the evening air high overhead apparently, and ever and anon the horns and bells of the passing tramway-cars as they glided through the Place Verte. Among the decorations of the bed-chamber hung a large engraving of an English hunting scene, with the dogs in full cry scampering over fences and ditches, and her eyes often wandered towards it, as, in her mind, it was associated with the last day she had been out with the Royal Buckhounds, and rode from the green lane home to Chilcote Beeches accompanied by Bevil Goring. And then from the picture she would turn to watch her father's pale and sleeping face. The grim visitant had more than once seemed nigh; but Sir Ranald Cheyne clung persistently to earth and earthly things.