I was quite anxious that they should meet, and yet I had a curious shrinking from it. My anxiety was as for something painful that has to be gone through, and the sooner the better. For I had made up my mind that Captain MacNeill must inevitably fall in love with Esther. I used to sit and look at her silently and try to see her as he would, and I said to myself that it was inevitable. Before Esther's eyes, and Esther's hair, and Esther's lovely colour-- Brown is my Love, but graceful, And each renowned whiteness Matched with that lovely brown loseth its brightness. --what chance would there be for blue eyes and pale cheeks and pale hair--if such desired to be remembered? And if he came to love Esther, would she not in time turn to his love and forget her boyish lover? Why, that was inevitable too. The elder, stronger man was, it seemed to me, so much more love-worthy. For in regard to Esther's love of Harry De Lacy I had always a little wonder. Now with me my love should be the stronger one, not I. And yet it seemed that the gentleness, the dependence, the need of Esther's lover was the dearest element in her love for him. Ah well! there are different ways of loving, and she might yet love differently. Somehow, as I thought these things, I seemed to be the spectator of a drama in which I had no part. What part was cast for me indeed--plain, little, with a limping foot--but to look at happiness through the eyes of others? Yet I was not resigned. On the contrary, my compassion for myself was so poignant that I often melted into tears. At last the meeting came about. I was at Annagower one afternoon, when, about tea-time, the General and Captain MacNeill were announced. It was nearly twilight, and we were sitting by a leaping fire. Esther was listless enough, but the fire gave a simulated life to her beauty, putting golden deeps into the darkness of her eyes, and bronze lights amid the shadows of her hair. She had a pretty pink frock of nun's veiling, and a handful of bronze leaves pinned in the soft folds at her throat. I drew back in the shadows to see how Captain MacNeill took his first introduction to her. He looked at her alertly indeed, and when he had sat down in my corner beside me he looked at her again. I did not know whether I was sorry or glad. There was admiration in his look, but it was an admiration entirely impersonal and distant; and after those two glances he looked only at me. He had been at home now several weeks, and in a day or two he and his father were going to London. There was business to be done, but they had been putting it off week after week, being so delightfully happy with each other at Rose Hill. The day after their call at Annagower I was in the library at Rose Hill. I had come in by the side door unannounced, and imagined I had the house to myself, pretty well, as usual, till the door opened and Captain MacNeill walked in. "Why," I said, "are you at home to-day?"