But a little time before Eveline had been unconscious of any special blessedness in her life; _now_--with regard to the fate of her brother and Evan Cameron--it seemed as if the restoration of the past, even while encumbered with captious, fretful, and jealous old Sir Paget, would be worth years of happiness. 'Oh, my brother--my brother Allan? Were there not wicked people enough in the world to be taken, that you must be reft from us?' And these words found a terrible echo in the heart of Olive. More weary and empty than ever did life look to both, these girls. Everyone seemed to have some one to love them--some object in life to engross them--but neither of them had any now. 'If I could only die--if I could only die!' Eveline would murmur, as she tossed her sweet face and dishevelled hair on her pillow, and thought of that grave in the desert, and betrayed a frame of mind beyond the conception of mundane Lucretia Hurdell. And her mind would go back to the old days with all their brightness at Dundargue and in Mayfair, before Sir Paget came into the family picture, and when pleasure seemed all her thought and occupation, and care quite beyond her province! And the girl lay there thinking--thinking--it was impossible for her not to think and surmise. But for this sudden accident, how long might Sir Paget have lived at his years: and how long would he have tormented her about Evan? As if to infer that she desired his death, how often had he said in the bitterness of his heart, before the news of Cameron's fall in action came, that 'he would cheat her yet, and live as long as she could do!' She was free now, and not past her girlhood; and, if in life, Evan would be loving her still. But she thrust that natural thought aside; why brood over it now, when Evan was no more, for somehow there seemed in it a species of treason to her dead husband--little as she had loved him--now that he too was in his grave. If this was her mode of viewing Evan Cameron, how little chance had Sir Harry Hurdell of affecting her heart! Now that Sir Paget was gone, Eveline repented that his last thoughts of her as a wife had been bitter, and tried to think of him as a friend who had been kind at one time, a husband whose settlements had been generous, and would have been greater but for the jealousy that made him alter his will. She now recalled with something like an emotion of pleasure, or certainly of satisfaction, that though she did not love, she had ever respected him, though his references to Evan Cameron had always made her wince and shiver. 'Poor man!' she exclaimed; 'and his soul went out into the night--in a moment--without time for a prayer or supplication to God!' 'So did the souls of our brave fellows at Tel-el-Kebir and elsewhere,' replied Olive, who had rather more metal in her composition than the softer Eveline.