The engagement ring--how tiny it looked!--was in his hand, and with something like a malediction he tossed it into a sheet of deep ornamental water that lay thereby, and there too, perhaps, he would have tossed all the other beautiful and valuable presents he had given her; but these the fair Annot did not as yet see her way to returning, and, sooth to say, he never thought of them. So--so he was 'thrown over' for one who seemed most suddenly and unaccountably to have come upon the tapis, but chiefly because he was a kind of outcast--a disinherited man. Had she not told him so in the plainest language? The situation was a grotesquely humiliating one. 'Oh, to be well and strong and fit to march again!' he sighed. In the expression of his dark eyes there was now much of the bitterness, keenness, and longing of a prisoner looking round the cell which he loathed, and from which he desired to be gone; and more than once, in the solitude of his room, he closed his eyes and rested his head upon his arms, as if he wished to see and hear of his then surroundings no more. Even the caresses of Maude--even Hester's gentle voice and soft touch failed to rouse him for a time. Some days elapsed before Roland--after thinking over again and again all the details of this most singular episode, the strangest _crisis_ in his life--could realize that it was not all a dream, and that the relations between himself and Annot had undergone such a complete revolution that their paths in life must lie apart for ever, now. But he was yet to learn the more bitter sequel to all this. Roland naturally thought that as the doctors would scarcely yet permit him to quit Earlshaugh and travel, now Annot Drummond would take her departure to Merlwood or London; but this she did not do, and seemed, with intense bad taste, to adopt the rôle of being his stepmother's guest, while sedulously avoiding him, so he began to make his arrangements for decamping without delay. In bidding adieu, out of mere courtesy to Mrs. Lindsay, Roland never referred to the existence of Annot. Neither did she. Was this good feeling, or was she endorsing the new situation adopted by Annot? He cared not to canvass the matter even in his own mind; but ere he quitted Earlshaugh he was yet, we have said, to learn the sequel to all this. CHAPTER XXXIX. TURNING THE TABLES. His sword and helmet cases, his portmanteau and travelling rugs were duly strapped and placed in the stately old entrance-hall in readiness, as Roland was to be off by an early morning train, and never again would he break bread in the home of his forefathers. Every link that bound him to Earlshaugh was broken now, and he felt only a feverish restlessness to be gone! Ere that came to pass, Roland's eyes were fated to be somewhat roughly opened.