'I--I know no one--I mean no harm--and Roland cannot ride to hounds just now,' urged Annot, a little piteously, and adopting her child-like manner. 'Then neither should you, Annot.' 'I will do so no more, Maude--and I give you my word,' she added emphatically, and with an air of perfect candour, 'that I shall never again see Mr. Hoyle!' Then Maude kissed her, but, as she did so, it scarcely required so close an observer as Hester to detect the actual dislike--all sweet and lovely as her face was--that lurked under her cousin's affected cordiality. But the latter's indignation returned when the pledge was broken. Deeming all this most unfair to Roland, his sunny-haired sister consulted with Hester, but that young lady nervously declined to involve herself in the matter, though Roland nearly took the initiative one day (when Hester was arranging some fresh flowers in his room) with reference to Annot's now frequent absences and seeming neglect of him. 'Does the dear girl shrink from me, Hester,' said he, 'because I am pale and thin--wasted and feeble--after that cursed accident?' 'Surely not, Roland!' 'It seems very like it, by Jove!' he grumbled almost to himself. In the dark violet eyes of Hester there shone at that moment, as she bent over the flower-vases, a strange light--the light that is born of mingled anger and love. Maude thought it very strange that in all reports of the meets, hunting and county packs, etc., the name of Mr. Hoyle never appeared among others, nor were her suspicions allayed by the idea of Jack Elliot, that 'he was probably a duffer whose name was not worth mentioning.' But gossip was busy, and Roland's loving and tender sister's complaints of Annot seemed to become the echo of his own secret and growing thoughts, which rose unpleasantly now on Annot's protracted absences from his society, and a new and undefinable something in her manner that, in short, he did not like. The half-uttered hints of Maude--uttered painfully and reluctantly, trembling lest she should become a mischief-maker--stung him deeply, more deeply than he cared to admit. 'What has Annot done now?' he asked on one occasion, tossing on his sofa and flinging away a half-smoked cigar. 'It seems to me that if a woman is popular with our sex she becomes intensely the reverse with her own.' 'Roland,' urged Maude, 'you are unnecessarily severe, on me at least.' 'Well--perhaps the atmosphere of this place is corrupting her; I don't wonder if it is so; we live here in one of deceit,' said he bitterly. 'Poor little Maude,' he added more gently, 'home is no longer home to you now.' 'I shall soon have another,' said Maude, with brightness dancing in her eyes of forget-me-not blue. 'Bui I must have this matter out with Annot--ask her to come to me.'