Olive, she thought, she must see Olive; doubtless Allan must have written home to her, and his letters might contain some details of this catastrophe that she would learn nowhere else, so she contrived a visit to Puddicombe Villa at Southsea on their way to Hurdell Hall. But she gained nothing by this. Lady Aberfeldie had heard of the late event in Egypt, and saw in a moment how it had affected her daughter. 'She is a very sensitive girl, Sir Paget,' said she, deprecatingly, in reply to a somewhat stinging remark of his; 'and thus you see the sudden death of this young man, so recently our guest at Dundargue, and so long her brother's tried friend and comrade, and one to whose courage that brother and all of us owe so much, has--not unnaturally, I think--greatly shocked her.' 'Shocked her rather too much, apparently,' jerked out Sir Paget, with a grimace. 'Who could have supposed that so brief an acquaintance--shall we call it an acquaintance?--could have produced an impression so deep.' Lady Aberfeldie bridled up a little and crested her handsome head; for, like Sir Paget, she had her own thoughts on the subject. 'Well, he is gone now,' said she, after a pause. 'And a devilish good thing, too,' added Sir Paget, roughly. She made no rejoinder, conceiving that the less that was said on the matter the better. Eveline found Olive in a very crushed state. Allan had never written to her, and, as yet, even his mother's letter of explanation had not been replied to. Perhaps he did not believe in it. He had left her abruptly and passionately and with a sore heart. Many such hearts are caught by others on the rebound, for the void in them is more easily filled up, and often requires to be so. 'Oh, heaven,' she thought, 'if such should be the case with Allan--not in Egypt, for that was very unlikely, but at Gibraltar or Malta, where English ladies were to be met with.' 'Even if married, I fear you would never win the Dunmow Flitch,' Lady Aberfeldie had said to her angrily on one occasion. 'My unfortunate money has been the cause of all this,' replied Olive. 'It excited the cunning and cupidity of that unfortunate man, Holcroft, and has led to the saddest misconceptions and misconstructions from the first between dear Allan and myself,' she added, in tears. 'Most true.' Olive knew that the doubtful position in which she had been placed with reference to Allan had, as she thought, been fully explained away in writing by his mother, and his father too; but from Allan there came no letter to herself. What did his silence mean? Even anger were better than nothing. 'My unfortunate money,' she repeated: 'my golden chains have proved a curse to us both. He has ceased to love me now, and, loving him as I do, what can my life be to me? And how shall I live on through all the months and years of it without him? What if we never meet again! He may fall in this war as his friend Cameron fell--oh, my love--not you--not you--not _that_.'