In the drawing-room, Cecil found the piano closed; there was evidently to be no music that evening, nor was he in the mood for it, except in so far that it might have served to cloak a few farewell words to Mary, whom he found occupied at chess with Mrs. Garth, and save that she trembled a little and changed colour at his entrance, she seemed unconscious of his presence, as the slow and silent game proceeded in its tedium: and leaving Sir Piers and Hew deep in some matter of local improvements to be made on a certain farm, he seated himself beside Miss Erroll, on an ottoman, a little way apart. 'And so you indeed go to-morrow?' she observed, for lack of something else to say apparently. 'Inexorably, Miss Erroll,' he replied, with a smile that was no smile at all; 'and after all the happiness I have enjoyed here I shall feel doubly lonely at Dumbarton, as it is most probable that the general may invite my brother officer here, to take my place.' 'Mr. Leslie Fotheringhame?' she said in a low voice, while her eyes drooped. 'Yes.' 'What leads you to think so?' she asked, with a little agitation of manner that Cecil could not fail to detect. 'He has once or twice said such was his intention.' Such, indeed, had been the general's wish, but recent events had made him change his mind. Miss Erroll was a singularly attractive and bright-looking girl--bright in her manner and blonde beauty. Her fair, golden hair rippled back from her broad, low, snowy forehead; and she had a tender, rosebud-like mouth, and very lovely eyes. In the full preoccupation of his thoughts with Mary, Cecil Falconer had not been quite conscious that on several occasions Miss Erroll had led him to talk of his solitary friend at Dumbarton, Leslie Fotheringhame, as if she had some interest in him; and also, that if he attempted to question her on the subject, she skilfully or nervously changed it, or evaded it. 'You know Fotheringhame, it would seem?' he asked. 'I do--or _did_, rather,' she replied, in a low voice. This implied that there had been a coolness, a quarrel, or a dropping of acquaintance somehow. 'He was not always in the Cameronians,' said Falconer. 'I am aware of that.' 'Perhaps you knew him when in his former regiment?' 'When in his former regiment--yes,' she replied, repeating his words, as if afraid to trust herself to any of her own. 'How long will Mary puzzle over her king?--she is quite checkmated!' she said with a forced laugh, as she moved towards the chess-table, to conceal from Falconer an expression of genuine pain that shot over her soft, fair face. He noticed now an unmistakable agitation of manner and sudden sadness of eye and tone in Annabelle Erroll; and though he almost immediately forgot this amid the anxiety of his own love affair, he remembered it all at a future time.