Kissed by him? Roland felt perfectly cured. The desecration, the dishonour, seemed complete! It is but too probable that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe felt the exultation of revenge and triumph in every kiss he took, even though he believed them to be unseen. Though it was now apparent that she had thrown 'dust' in Roland's eyes by using the name of _another_, and had thus doubly lied to him, the blow did not fall so unexpectedly, yet the degradation of it was complete. Hoyle was a myth--a blind to throw him off the right track--and he had been discarded, not for that personage, but for Hawkey Sharpe. This was truly to find 'In the lowest deep a lower deep' of utter humiliation! At last they passed onward, and he was again alone. 'I have undergone something like the torture of the rack,' said he with a bitter laugh, when he related to Maude and Hester what he had been compelled to overhear in the summer-house, and the latter thought of that eventful evening at Merlwood, when she so unwittingly had in like manner been compelled to lurk in the shrubbery and hear a revelation that crushed her own heart to the dust. Thus, though he knew it not, the tables were turned on Roland with a vengeance. Like Hester, he could not agree with Romeo-- 'How sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,' when the said tongues addressed all their sweetness to others. 'She is an ungrateful, selfish, horrible girl--I'll never forgive her--never!' said Maude, almost sobbing with anger. 'How filthy lucre rules the world now!' exclaimed Roland. 'Do such girls as she ever repent the mischief they make--the hearts they have broken?' 'As if hearts break nowadays? she would ask,' said Hester with something of a smile. 'Likely enough--it is her style, no doubt. But can you, Hester, or anyone, explain this cruel duplicity? To me it seems as if I were still in the middle of a horrid dream--a dream from which I must suddenly wake. That she, so winsome and artless apparently--so gentle and loving, should become so cold, so calculating, so mercilessly cruel now!' 'I always mistrusted her,' said Maude bitterly. 'People call her eyes hazel--to me they always seemed a kind of vampire-green.' Roland made no reply, but he was thinking with Whyte-Melville: 'Who shall account for the fascination exercised by some women upon all who approach their sphere? The peculiar power of the rattlesnake, whose eye is said to lure the conscious victim unresistingly to its doom, and the attractive properties possessed by certain bodies, and by them used with equal recklessness and cruelty, are two arrangements of Nature which make me believe in mesmerism.' 'Well--to-morrow I quit this place without beat of drum!' exclaimed Roland. 'For Edinburgh?' 'Yes--to the Club.' 'And then?' 'For Egypt. There I shall live every day of my life as if there were no to-morrow.' 'Nonsense!' said Jack. 'You'll get over all this in time--a hit in the wing, that is all!'