'It is nothing,' she replied, with a little flush. 'I am oppressed, I suppose, by the emptiness and size of this great house. I am such an impressionable little thing you know, Roland.' 'We can't amend the size of the house,' said he, smiling, 'but a cosier and a smaller one awaits us elsewhere, when you are my dear little wife, and we quit this place, once so dear to me, as I never thought to quit it in disgust--for ever!' Seeing the varying moods of Annot, and the occasional petulance, even coldness, with which she sometimes ventured to treat Roland now, Hester, remembering that young lady's confidences with reference to Mr. Bob Hoyle and other 'detrimentals,' her avowed passion for money, and how a moneyed match was a necessity of her life, and knowing Roland's changed position and fortunes--Hester, we say, was not slow in putting 'two and two together,' to use a common adage, to the detriment of Annot in her estimation. 'I would that I were a strong-minded woman,' said the latter reproachfully, as she and Roland lingered one evening in a corridor that was a veritable picture gallery (for there hung the Lindsays of other days, as depicted by the brushes of the Jamesons, the Scougals, De Medinas, Raeburns, and Watsons in the striking costumes of their times), and Roland had been taking her a little to task for some of her petulant remarks. 'A strong-minded woman,' he repeated. 'Nonsense! But why?' 'Then I should cease to annoy you, and join an Anglican Sisterhood, to nurse the poor and all that sort of thing.' She pouted prettily as she spoke--sweetly, with all her softest dimples coming into play. 'Are you not perfectly happy, Annot?' 'Oh, yes--yes!' she exclaimed, and interlaced her fingers on his arm; yet he eyed her moodily, and lovingly, ignorant of the secret source of her discontent or disquietude. 'How can I take her to task,' thought he; 'already too! so fair, so bright, with her hair like spun gold!' He tried to catch and retain her loving glance, but the corners of her pretty mouth were drooping, and her eyes of pale hazel looked dreamily and vacantly out on the far extent of sunlit park and the white fleecy clouds that floated above it; but he thought he read that in her face which made him long for health and strength to take her away from Earlshaugh to the new home he had now begun to picture, and seldom a day passed now without something occuring to increase this wish. 'Roland,' said Maude on one occasion, as she drove him out through the pleasant lanes in her pretty pony phaeton, 'that odious creature Hawkey Sharpe is still, I understand, hovering about here.' 'Bent on mischief, you think?' 'Too probably.' 'Well, I am powerless to prevent him. He is, you know, his sister's factotum and now all but Laird of Earlshaugh.'