Though possessing no brilliant beauty, the face of the sunny-haired Maude was one usually full of merriment, and capable of expressing intense tenderness--one winning beyond all words; but it grew cloudy and stern at the thought of 'these interlopers,' as she always called them--Deborah Sharpe and her obnoxious brother. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PRESENTIMENT. Among her letters one morning--though her chief correspondent was her father, the old Indian veteran at Merlwood, whose shaky caligraphy there was no mistaking--there came one which gave Hester a species of electric shock. It bore the postmarks 'Egypt' and 'Cairo,' with stamps having the Pyramids and Sphinx's head thereon. 'From Malcolm Skene!' she said to herself; 'Malcolm Skene, and to _me_!' She hurried to her room that she might read it in solitude, for it was impossible that she could fail to do so with deep interest after all that Malcolm Skene had said to her, and the knowledge of all that might have been--yea, yet perhaps might be; but the letter, dated more than a month before at Cairo, simply began:-- 'MY DEAR MISS MAULE, 'My excuse for writing to you,' he continued, 'is--and your pardon must be accorded to me therefore--that I am ordered on a distant, solitary, and perilous duty, from which I have, for the first time in my life, a curious, yet solemn, presentiment that I shall never return. 'This emotion may, please God, be a mistake; and I hope so, for my dear mother's sake. It may only be that superstition which some deem impiety; but we Skenes of Dunnimarle have had it in more than one generation--a kind of foreknowledge of what was to happen to us, or to be said or done by those we met. As some one has it, the map of coming events is before us, and the spirit surveys it, and for the time we are translated into another sphere, and re-act, perhaps, foregone scenes. Be that as it may, the unbidden emotion of presentiment seems to have some affinity to that phenomenon.' 'What a strange letter; and how unlike Malcolm--thoughtful and grave as he is!' was Hester's idea. 'I read a few days ago that some calamity had occurred at Earlshaugh; that my dear old friend and comrade Roland had met with an accident--had _disappeared_! What did that mean? But too probably I shall never learn now, and, as I have not again seen the matter referred to in print, hope it may all be a canard--a mistake. 'You remember our last interview? Oh, Hester, while life remains to me I shall never, never forget it? I think or hope you may care for me now in pity as we are separated--or might learn to care for me at a future time. Tell me to wait that time; if I return from my mission, Hester, and I shall do so--yea, were it seven years, if you wish it to be--if at the end of those seven years you would lay your dear hand in mine and tell me that you would be my wife.