'Perhaps, but ours won't be so,' replied Hawkey Sharpe with a knowing wink. 'I expect it will be rather good fun.' She shivered a little at his bad style. The visits that are usually paid and received, the letters that are usually written, the choosing of much useless millinery, furniture, plate, and equipages, and the being 'trotted out' for the inspection of mutual friends were all avoided or evaded by the quiet mode in which Jack Elliot and Maude were made one, and their nuptials a fact accomplished; but there was no time for 'doing' Paris, Berlin, the Riviera, or Rome, as Jack was bound for Egypt within a tantalizingly short period, so he secured a charming little villa for his bride in the southern and perhaps most pleasing quarter of the Modern Athens till he could return--if he ever did return--from that land of disease and death, where so many of our young and brave have found their last home. Mr. Hawkey Sharpe at Earlshaugh laughed viciously when he read the announcement of the marriage in the newspapers. It was not a pleasant laugh, even Annot thought, and boded ill to some one. Maude seemed beyond his reach now, so far as he seemed concerned; but there remained to him still hatred and revenge, as we may have to show. CHAPTER XLIV. THE TROOPSHIP. So while Jack and Maude were absent on their brief honeymoon Roland bade adieu to Hester, his old uncle Sir Harry, and to pleasant Merlwood ere turning his steps to the East. As he looked on the refined face of the girl, with her long-lashed gentle eyes, for the last time, something of the old tenderness that Annot had clouded, warped, or won away, came into his heart again, and he longed to take her kindly in his arms ere he went, but stifled the desire, and simply held forth his hand when she proffered her pale and half-averted cheek. He dared not kiss away the quiver he saw upon her lips. 'Good-bye, dear Hester,' said he. 'Have you not a word or two that I may take with me--such as a dear sister might give?' But her still quivering lips were voiceless; the forced smile on them was gone, and the soft light of her violet-blue eyes was quenched as if by recent tears; sweet eyes they were, dreamy and languid, their white lids fringed by lashes long and dark. Roland noted this with a heavy heart, and thought his gentle cousin never looked so beautiful or attractive as then, when her little hand, which trembled, was clasped for the last time in his, and she withdrew to the end of the room. 'Good-bye, nephew,' said Sir Harry, propping himself on a stout Indian cane. 'God keep you from harm, and may every good attend you; but,' he added, his keen eyes glistening angrily through the film that spread over them, 'does your conscience quite absolve you?' 'In what, uncle?' 'What? Why, your conduct to my girl--your cousin Hester,' said Sir Harry, in a low voice. 'Uncle?'