'Their sculptures, I mean,' replied Eveline, as they swept down the great staircase to the dining-room. CHAPTER V. OLIVE AND ALLAN. A few days had now passed since Allan Graham's return to Dundargue, but he seemed--though greatly attracted by his cousin Olive, and in a manner compelled to think of her as something more than a mere cousin--to make no progress in her favour at all. Sometimes he smoked beside her in utter silence, while she swung in a hammock between two trees on the lawn, deep--or affecting to be so--in the last three-volume novel that had come in the box from Edinburgh; and, when they stole furtive glances at each other, his were curious and hers, under the shadow of her gorgeous Japanese umbrella, were hostile, defiant at least, and thus not without a certain drollery; but few remarks were interchanged of a more exciting nature than that 'the weather was lovely,' or 'the leaves were falling.' In these days, and for long after, Olive was terribly uncertain in her moods, and to Allan Graham it seemed at times as if she almost disliked him. When they were alone together, which was seldom, she scarcely spoke to him, and thus his enforced silence disposed her to be more silent still. To Olive the whole situation was one of miserable unrest; she felt that there was something grotesque in it, and she longed intensely to be anywhere else than at Dundargue. While Allan, admiring her rare beauty and pretty, petulant ways, was already learning to love her, he found his tongue loaded, as it were, tied up, and his tenderness cramped by the strange tenor of her father's will, which made him feel that, love her as he might, that love would never seem pure, or without the taint of selfishness. He had procured for her at Malta a complete suite of gold and pearl-mounted Maltese jewellery, the best that could be found in the Strada San Paoli, costing him more than even he could well afford; but now so cold and repellant was her demeanour that he had not the courage as yet to present the elaborate trinkets--so rich in fretwork and fine as a gossamer web--so they were left to repose in their purple velvet cases. Yet his thoughts about her were becoming persistent now. Times there were when he conceived that he would treat her judiciously, but tenderly, and in such a fashion that her feelings must slide into a species of sisterly, or at least cousinly, interest in him; but then--at these times--a flash of her dark grey-blue eyes cast these intentions to the winds, though Allan began to feel nothing but passionate love for her.