'I presume these spurs are a present to you, from your friend Mr. Welsher Twigg, the gentleman rider, whose peculiar riding so favoured you at Ayr and York last year,' said Mr. Balderstone, with some contempt of manner, while Hew's parti-coloured eyes now gleamed with rage, for it was averred on the turf, that bribed by him, the rider in question, when pretending to give a horse a bucket of water, daubed his nostrils with blood, to make people believe the animal had broken a blood vessel, and had secretly loosened the nails in the shoes of another, at a hurdle-race, to prevent him winning. As these black rumours had never reached the ear of Sir Piers, Mr. Balderstone felt that he had 'scored one' by the taunt; but in a time to come, and by both unforeseen then, he was to run up a terrible and crushing score against Hew Montgomerie, with a result that neither could have imagined. Slowly passed the days now with Mary. The spacious house was full of new guests, and pleasant ones too, but it seemed dull and dreary, since _he_ was no longer there. His place was vacant. The click of balls came from the billiard-room, and the sound of merry voices, but his was no longer there, or at her piano now. All seemed changed to Mary. Sir Piers never adverted to his visit, his name or his existence; and scarcely ever to the old and invariable topic of the Cameronians. Why was this? Did he suspect their secret, or was Hew the spirit of evil? She could not doubt that; and her sympathetic friend Annabelle Erroll, who was a close observer of affairs, and had all Mary's confidence, thought so too. But Annabelle Erroll had thoughts that were peculiarly her own, over the departure of Cecil Falconer. 'He has gone from me to Leslie,' she said to herself; 'to Leslie Fotheringhame, to tell him that he has spent a whole month with me--a month in my society, and I have given no sign that Leslie's existence was ever aught to me--at least, I hope so--and yet there was a time when I was all the world to him! Yes--yes--it is indeed over and done with, the love that was once ours. Will Leslie ask him how I am looking?' (she glanced at her soft blonde beauty in the mirror). 'Or how I am comporting myself--sadly or merrily?--if I am unchanged from the Annabelle of the time that can come no more?' For some mysterious reason she had not taken her friend Mary into her confidence at first, when Fotheringhame's name was spoken of; and now she shrunk from doing so, lest she might seem wanting in candour; and, as the love she referred to was 'over and done with,' what mattered it now?' And yet often Mary might have drawn such a confidence from her. 'Oh, Annabelle,' she would sometimes say, 'so quick is fancy, that occasions there are when I see a figure like Cecil's in the distance--the figure of some one else, whose walk or gesture recalls him vividly to me--that I feel something like a sharp pang in my heart.'