'Young hearts, bright eyes, and rosy lips were there; And fairy steps, and light and laughing voices Ringing like welcome music through the air-- A sound at which the untroubled heart rejoices.' Life seemed a happy idyl, and that of Annot--we must suppose that she had her special dreams of happiness too--was ever gay apparently; but Roland's soul was secretly steeped in misery! Circumstanced as he knew himself to be, Annot's frequent praises of Earlshaugh and her delight with all therein galled and fretted him, and made him so strange in manner at times that the girl, to do her justice, was bewildered and grieved; and Hester, though she wished it not nor thought of it, was in some degree avenged. 'What can be the meaning of it?' was often Annot's secret thought. Like Elliot and Maude, to her it seemed that perhaps they were too happy for commonplace speeches as they idled hand-in-hand about the grounds, wandering through vistas of thick and venerable hawthorn-hedges, away by the thatched hamlet, through the wooded haugh, where the 'auld brig-stane' still spanned the wimpling burn, while face turned to radiant face, and loving eye met eye. In such moments what need had they, she thought, for words that might seem dull or clumsy? 'But, after all, words, though coarse or clumsy, are the coin in which human creatures must pay each other, and failing in which they are often bankrupts for life.' Had Roland spoken then and said much that he left unsaid, perhaps much suffering might have been spared him at a future time--we says 'perhaps,' but not with certainty, as we have only our story to tell, without indulging in casuistry as to what might have occurred in the sequel. The story of the will, Annot began to think, must have been a fallacy--a cruel and unpalatable one. By-and-by she refused to face the probability at all; but she could not help remarking that when their conversation insensibly turned upon the future, as that of lovers must do, upon their probable trip to London, his certain tour of service in Egypt, or on anything that lay beyond the sunny horizon of the _present_, Roland became strange in manner, abrupt and cloudy, and nervously sought to turn the subject into another channel. Could he tell her yet, that he was a kind of outcast in the house of his forefathers; that he was a mere visitor at Earlshaugh, and that not a foot of the soil he trod was his own?