Time to think! Poor Mary had plenty of that: time to ponder in long and oppressive hours, as she lingered by the dovecot with the pigeons fluttering round her; by the burn that flowed at the garden-foot, with Mudie's last new novel half-cut and wholly unread in her lap; and, lost in a day-dream, saw the bees seek the flowers and the butterflies darting to and fro, while wondering with all the intensity of love and pity where _he_ was, and what doing, now! Sir Piers did not precisely see his way to acting like the stern parent or fiery guardian of the melodrama; but he thought that the time was approaching when he _must_ do something to bend Mary to his purpose, and compel or cajole her into the acceptance of Hew, his heir of entail and successor. 'You knew that--that young man but a very short time, Mary,' said he one day in reference to Falconer, and playfully pinching her chin. 'True,' she replied, with a sweet sad smile; 'but it does not take years to learn to--love. Was it so with you, grand-uncle?' 'No, by Jove! we were in cantonments at Simmerabad, and expecting the route every day, the route for Jubbulpore, when Lady Montgomerie and I were married, egad! at the drum-head, I may say.' But as far as Hew's interests were concerned, a visit from Mr. John Balderstone one day gave Sir Piers much occasion to think over them--and pause. A close correspondence with Annabelle Erroll was Mary's chief solace and support about this time; they had so much in common to commune about. Yet the name of Fotheringhame never once escaped the former, though he was mourning that a girl with such an amount of strength of character and so much loveliness had gone out of his life--for Annabelle was a wonderfully beautiful girl--beautiful with the charms of glittering golden hair, of slightness of form and white purity; tall, slender and full of grace; and though her heart was wrung by the memory of all she had passed through since the night of the Cameronian ball--that night on which she had been so happy--she thanked Heaven for the strength it gave her to cut the Gordian knot and quit the atmosphere of doubt, perplexity, degrading deception, and chaos in which she had latterly found herself in Edinburgh. 'No girl could be expected to undergo that sort of thing over and over again,' as she once wrote to Mary; so well it was, she added, that she had with decision laid the future lines of her life and that of Fotheringhame, so far apart from each other.