Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 098, February, 1876

by Various

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF "PATRICIA KEMBALL."

CHAPTER XXI.

CHANGES.

Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all, was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and forgot to tell you."

As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly, "That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a caput mortuum of no value.

To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence, but he could see no connection between the two circumstances of madame's sudden death and Alick's fracture of that bottle of hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not to trace it. So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in which she had lived.

Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected to return a little more like other English girls than she had been hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House—he went back to the original name after madame's death—and left England to shake off in travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and taken all the flavor out of his life. He had never cared to search out the real history of that fair beloved woman. Enough had come to his knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death, to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling. For among these bills was one from the local geologist for "a beginner's cabinet of specimens," delivered just about the time when he, Sebastian, had spent so many pleasant hours in arranging the fragments which madame said represented both her knowledge and her lost happiness; also one from the fancy repository, which sold everything, for sundry water-color drawings and illuminated texts, a Table of the Ten Commandments illustrated, and the like, which sufficiently explained all on this side, and settled for ever the dead woman's claims to the artistic and scientific merit with which Mr. Dundas and the rector had credited her.

Also, certain ugly letters from a person of the name of Lowes, in London, put him on the track, had he cared to follow it up, of a deception even worse than that of pretended art or mock science. These letters, written in the same handwriting as that wherein Julius de Montfort, her brother-in-law, the present marquis, had told her of the defalcations of the family solicitor and trustee, called Virginie, Madame la Marquise de Montfort, plain Susan bluntly, and reminded her of the screw that would be turned if the writer was not satisfied; and were letters that demanded money, always money, as the price of continued silence.

But Sebastian had loved his second wife too well to seek to know the truth, if that truth would be to her discredit. He preferred to be deceived; and he had what he preferred. He stifled all doubts, darkened all chinks by which the obtrusive light might penetrate, kept his love if not his faith unshaken, caring only to remember her as beautiful, seductive, soothing, and mourning her as deeply, doubtful as she had proved herself to be, as he had loved her fondly when he believed her honest. It was a curious mental condition for a man to cherish, but it satisfied him, and his regret was not robbed of its pathos by knowledge.

Now that the four years were completed, the widower had to return to his desolate home and make the best he could of the fragments of peace and happiness left to him. Leam was nineteen: it was time for her to be taken from school and given the protection of her father's house. It went against the man's heart to have her, but he was compelled, if he wished to stand well with his friends, and he hoped that the girl would be found improved from these years of discipline and training, and be rational and like other people. Wherefore he came home one dry dull day in October, and the neighborhood welcomed him, if not as their prodigal returned, yet as their lunatic restored to his right mind.

During these four years a few changes had taken place at North Aston. Carry Fairbairn had married—not Frank Harrowby: he had found a rich wife, not in the least to his personal taste, but greatly to his profit; and Carry, after having cried a good deal for a month, had consoled herself with a young clergyman from the North, whom she loved quite as much as if she had never fancied Frank at all, and spoilt in the first months by such submission as caused her to repent for all the years of her life after.

The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage! She was an exceedingly pretty little girl, with fair skin, fair hair and dark eyes—willful of course, and spoilt of course; the only one in the house who took her in hand to correct being Adelaide. And as she took her in hand too smartly, Mrs. Birkett generally interfered, and the servants combined to screen her; the result being that the little one was mistress of the situation, after the manner of willful children, and made every one more or less anxious and uncomfortable as her return for their care.

Alick Corfield was the rector's curate. On the whole, this was the most important of all the North Aston events which had taken place during the last four years. Soon after madame's death and Leam's transfer from home to school Alick had a strange and sudden illness. No one knew what to make of it, nor how it came, nor what it was, but the doctor called it cerebral fever, and when the families got hold of the word they were content. Cerebral fever does as well as anything else for an illness of which no one knows and no one seeks to know the cause, and to the origin of which the patient himself gives no clew. It was a peg, and a peg was all that was wanted.

On his recovery he announced his intention of going to Oxford to read for holy orders. His mother was piteously distressed, as might be expected. She feared all sorts of evil for her boy, from damp sheets and unmended linen to over-study, wine-parties and bold-faced minxes weaving subtle webs of fascination. But for the first time in his life Alick stood out against her insistance, and his will conquered hers. The sequel of the struggle was, that he went to Oxford, took his degree, read for orders, passed, and that Mr. Birkett gave him his title as his curate.

It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put all the crooked things of life straight. The one pooh-poohed the enthusiasm of the other, derided his belief in humanity and assured him of failure: the other felt as if he had been taken behind the scenes and shown the blue fire of which the awful lightning of his youth was made. Mr. Birkett could not quite forbid the greater faith, the more loving endeavor which the young man threw into his ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school, the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had been right throughout.

But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and, the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.

For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole history of the place and people before he had been at Lionnet a month.

At the Hill things remained unchanged for the ladies, save for the additional burden of years and the pleasant news that Edgar was expected home daily. Adelaide, now twenty-four, took the news as a personal grace, and blossomed into smiles and glad humor of which only Josephine understood the source. But Josephine held her tongue, and received the confidence of her young friend with discretion. As she had never dispossessed her own old idol, she could feel for Adelaide, and she was not disposed to look on her patient determination with displeasure. The constancy of the two, however, was very different in essential meaning. With Josephine it was the constancy that is born of an affectionate disposition and the absence of rival Lotharios: with Adelaide it was the result of calculation and decision. The one would have worshiped Sebastian as she worshiped him now had he been ruined, a cripple, a criminal even: the other would have shut out Edgar inexorably from her very dreams had not his personality included the Hill. With the one it was self-abasement—with the other self-consideration; but it came to the same thing in the end, and the men profited equally.

All these changes Sebastian Dundas found to have taken place when he returned to North Aston with gray hair instead of brown, his smooth, fair skin tanned and roughened, and his weak, finely-cut, effeminate mouth hidden by a moustache of a reddish tint, mingled with white. Still, he was Sebastian; and after the first shock of his altered appearance had been got over, Josephine carried her incense in the old way, and found her worship as dear and as tantalizing as ever.

Lastly, as the crowning change of all, Leam came home from school; no longer the arrogant, embittered child, looking at life through the false medium of pride and ignorance, saying rude things and doing odd ones with the most perfect unconsciousness; but well-bred, graceful, sufficiently instructed not to make patent mistakes, and more beautiful by far than she had even promised to be. Her very eyes were lovelier, lovely as they had always been: they had more variety of expression, were more dewy and tender, and, if less tragic, were more spiritual. That hard, dry, burning passion which had devoured her of old time seemed to have gone, as also her savage Spanish pride. She had rounded and softened in body too, as in mind. Her skin was fairer; her lips were not so firmly closed, so rigid in line, so constricted in motion; her brows were more flexible and not so often knit together; and her slight, lithe figure was perfect in line and movement. Still, she had enough of her former manner of being for identity. Grave, quiet, laconic, direct, she was but a modification of the former Leam as they had known her—Leam, Pepita's daughter, and with blood in her veins that was not the ordinary blood of the ordinary British miss.

Her father's artistic perceptions were gratified as he met her at the station and Leam turned her cheek to him voluntarily with tears in her eyes. Turning her cheek was apparently her idea of kissing; but if not too intense an expression of affection, it was at least an improvement on the old hard repulsion, and Sebastian accepted it as the concession it was meant to be. Indeed, they met somewhat as foes reconciled, or rather seeking to be reconciled, and Mr. Dundas did not wish to keep open old sores. Her cheek, turned to him somewhere about the ear, represented to his mind a peace-offering: her eyes full of tears were as a confession of past sins and a promise of amendment. Not that he understood why she was so much more effusive than of old, but if it augured a happier life together, he was glad.

As they drove up to the door of the old home, crowded with memories and associations, a shudder passed over the girl: she grasped her father's hand in her own almost convulsively, and he heard her say below her breath, "Poor papa!"

He wondered why she pitied him. The place must surely be full of memories of her mother for her: why did she say "Poor papa!" to him? He did not see what she saw—that peaceful September evening, and the bottle of cherry-water on the table, with the little phial of thirty deaths in her hand; and now the contents emptied into the harmless draught; and now madame pale and dead. The whole scene transacted itself vividly before her, and she shuddered at her memories and her past self, as always with a kind of vague wonder how she could have been so wicked, and where did she get the force, the courage, for such a cruel crime?

For all these four years at school the shadow of that dreadful deed had been ever in the background of her life; and as time went on, and she came to a better understanding of morality, it grew clear to her as a crime. Its consciousness of guilt had broken down her pride, and thus had made her more malleable, more humble. She could no longer harden herself in her belief that she was superior to every one else. Those girls, her companions—they had not had an Andalusian mother, truly; they did not pray to the saints, and the Holy Virgin took no care of them; they were Protestants and English, frogs and pigs; but they had not committed murder. If she should stand up in the middle of the room and tell them what she had done, which of them would touch her hand again? which of them speak to her? English and Protestants as they were, how far superior in their innocence to her, an Andalusian Catholic, in her guilt! But no one lives with remorse. It comes and goes gustily, fitfully; but the things of the present are stronger than the things of the past, else the man with a shameful secret in his life would go mad.

One of these gusty storms broke over Leam as she passed through the gates of the old home, and for the moment she felt as if she must confess the truth to her father and tell him what evil thing she had done. Yet it passed, as other such storms had passed: the things of the present took their natural place of prominence, and those of the past sank again into the background, shadows that never faded quite away, but that were not actualities pressing against her.

The news of Leam's home-coming created quite a pleasurable excitement in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had changed her spots. They were divided among themselves as to whether she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else, but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease, professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to her cure. At the worst, however, here she was—one of themselves whom they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the best of her, and hope all things till they proved some.

There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet. This was Alick Corfield. She wondered what he knew, or rather what he suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over. But, though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling, inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick did not appear. He waited until after Sunday, when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her alone.

When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his, she knew all. He shared her secret, and knew what she had done. It was not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful, or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew. He was no longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog: he was her friend, and he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him—known, in his power, but safe.

"You are changed," he said awkwardly.

He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared not use the familiar name, and yet she was not "Miss Dundas" to him.

"It is four years since you saw me," she said with a grave smile. "It was time to change."

"But you are your old self too," he returned eagerly. He would have no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams: what worm soever was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set fair in the sun where he might be.

"You seem much changed too," she said after a short pause—"graver and older. Is that because you are a clergyman?"

Alick turned his eyes away from the girl's face, and looked mournfully out onto the autumn woods. "Partly," he said.

"And the other part?" asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.

"And the other part?" He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler. "Well, never mind the other part. There are things which sometimes come into a man's life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over a green tree, but we do not speak of them."

"To no one?"

"To no one."

Leam sighed. No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between them. Henceforth she was in Alick's power: let him be faithful, chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own unshared property. He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.

Poor Alick! This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret. True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use it. He was the doomed if innocent, as of old tragic times—the sinless Cain guilty of murder, but guiltless in intent. It was for this, as much as for the love and poetry of the boyish days, that he felt he owed himself to Leam—that his life was hers, and all his energies were to be devoted for her good. It was for this that he had prayed with such intensity of earnestness it seemed to him sometimes as if his soul had left his body, and had gone up to the Most High to pluck by force of passionate entreaty the pardon he besought: "Pardon her, O Lord! Turn her heart, enlighten her understanding, convince her of her sin; but pardon her, pardon her, dear Lord! And with her, pardon me."

The man's whole life was spent in this one wild, fervid prayer. All that he did was tinged with the sentiment of winning grace for her and pardon for both. In his own mind they stood hand in hand together; and if he was the intercessor, they were both to benefit, and neither would be saved without the other. And he believed in the value of his prayers and in the objective reality of their influence.

For the final changes in the ordering of home and society at North Aston, the week after Leam returned Edgar Harrowby came from India, and took up his position as the owner of the Hill estate; and the child Fina was brought to Ford House, and formally invested with her new name and condition as Miss Fina Dundas, Sebastian's younger daughter. Mindful of the past, Mr. Dundas expected to have a stormy scene with Leam when he told her his intentions respecting poor madame's child; but Leam answered quietly, "Very well, papa," and greeted Fina when she arrived benevolently, if not effusively. She was not one of those born mothers who love babies from their early nursery days, but she was kind to the child in her grave way, and seemed anxious to do well by her.

The ladies all bestowed on her their nursery recipes and systems in rich abundance—especially Mrs. Birkett, who, though glad to be relieved from the hourly task of watching and contending, was still immensely interested in the little creature, and gave daily counsel and superintendence. So that on the whole Leam was not left unaided with her charge. On the contrary, she ran great risk of being bewildered by her multiplicity of counselors, and of entering in consequence on that zigzag course which covers much ground and makes but little progress.

CHAPTER XXII.

EDGAR HARROWBY.

Thirty-two years of age; tall, handsome, well set-up, and every inch a soldier; manly in bearing, but also with that grace of gesture and softness of speech which goes by the name of polished manner; a bold sportsman, ignorant of physical fear, to whom England was the culmination of the universe, and such men as he—gentlemen, officers, squires—the culmination of humanity; a man who loved women as creatures, but despised them as intelligences; who respected socially the ladies of his own class, and demanded that they should be without stain, as befits the wives and mothers and sisters of gentlemen, but who thought women of a meaner grade fair game for the roving fowler; a conservative, holding to elemental differences whence arise the value of races, the dignity of family and the righteousness of caste; an hereditary landowner, regarding landed property as a sacred possession meant only for the few and not to be suffered to lapse into low-born hands; a gentleman, incapable of falsehood, treachery, meanness, social dishonor, but not incapable of injustice, tyranny, selfishness, even cruelty, if such came in his way as the privilege of his rank,—this was Edgar Harrowby as the world saw and his friends knew him, and as North Aston had henceforth to know him.

His return caused immense local excitement and great rejoicing. It seemed to set the social barometer at "fair," and to promise a spell of animation such as North Aston had been long wanting. And indeed personally for himself it was time that Major Harrowby was at home and at the head of his own affairs. Matters had been going rather badly on the estate without him, and the need of a strong hand to keep agents straight and tenants up to the mark had been making itself somewhat disastrously felt during the last three or four years. Wherefore he had sold out, broken all his ties in India handsomely, as he had broken them in London handsomely once before, when, mad with jealousy, he had fled like a thief in the night, burned his boats behind him, and, as he thought, obliterated every trace by which that loved and graceless woman could discover his real name or family holding; and now had come home prepared to do his duty to society and himself. That is, prepared to marry a nice girl of his own kind, keep the estate well in hand, and set an example of respectability and orthodoxy, family prayers and bold riding, according to the ideal of the English country gentleman.

But, above all, he must marry. And the wife provided for him by the eternal fitness of things was Adelaide Birkett. Who else could be found to suit the part so perfectly? She was well-born, well-mannered; though not coarsely robust, yet healthy in the sense of purity of blood; and she was decidedly pretty. So far to the good of the Harrowby stock in the future. Neither was she too young, though by reason of her quiet country life her twenty-four years did not count more to her in wear and tear of feeling and the doubtful moulding of experience than if she had lived through one London season. She was a girl of acknowledged good sense, calm, equable, holding herself in the strictest leash of ladylike reserve, and governing all her emotions without trouble, patent or unconfessed. Hers was a character which would never floreate into irregular beauties to give her friends anxiety and crowd her life with embarrassing consequences. She despised sentiment and ridiculed enthusiasm, thought skepticism both wicked and disreputable, but at the same time fanaticism was silly, and not nearly so respectable as that quiet, easy-going religion which does nothing of which society would disapprove, but does not break its heart in trying to found the kingdom of God on earth.

All her relations with life and society would be blameless, orthodox, ladylike and thoroughly English. As a wife she would preach submission in public and practice domination and the moral repression belonging to the superior being in private. As a mother she would take care to have experienced nurses and well-bred governesses, who would look after the children properly, when she would wash her hands of further trouble and responsibility, save to teach them good manners at luncheon and self-control in their evening visit to the drawing-room for the "children's half hour" before dinner. As the mistress of an establishment she would be strict, demanding perfect purity in the morals of her servants, not suffering waste, nor followers, nor kitchen amusements that she knew of, nor kitchen individuality anyhow. Her servants would be her serfs, and she would assume to have bought them by food and wages in soul as well as body, in mind as well as muscle. She would give broken meat in moderation to the deserving poor, but she would let those who are not deserving do the best they could with want at home and inclemency abroad; and she would have called it fostering vice had she fed the husbandless mother when hungry or clothed the drunkard's children when naked. She would never be talked about for extremes or eccentricities of any kind; and the world would be forced to mention her with respect when it mentioned her at all, having indeed no desire to do otherwise. For she was of the kind dear to the heart of England—one of those who are called the salt of the earth, and who are assumed to keep society safe and pure. She was incredulous of science, contemptuous of superstition, impatient of new ideas—appreciating art, but holding artists as inferior creatures, like actors, acrobats and newspaper writers. She was loyal to the queen and royal family, the nobility and Established Church, bracketing republicans with atheists, and both with unpunished felons; as also classing immorality, the facts of physiology and the details of disease in a group together, as things horrible and not to be spoken of before ladies. She was not slow to believe evil of her neighbors, maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was a well-mannered, well-conducted English lady, a person of spotless morals and exquisite propriety, in the presence of whom humanity must not be human, truth truthful, nor Nature natural.

This was the wife for Edgar Harrowby as a country gentleman—the woman whom Mrs. Harrowby would have chosen out of thousands to be her daughter-in-law, whom his sisters would like, who would do credit to his name and position; and whom he himself would find as good for his purpose as any within the four seas.

For when Edgar married he would marry on social and rational grounds: he would not commit the mistake of fancying that he need love the woman as he had loved some others. He would marry her, whoever she might be, because she would be of a good family and reasonable character, fairly handsome, unexceptionable in conduct, not tainted with hereditary disease nor disgraced by ragged relatives, having nothing to do with vice or poverty in the remotest link of her connections—a woman fit to be the keeper of his house, the bearer of his name, the mother of his children. But for love, passion, enthusiasm, sentiment—Edgar thought all such emotional impedimenta as these not only superfluous, but oftentimes disastrous in the grave campaign of matrimony.

It was for this marriage that Adelaide had saved herself. She believed that any woman can marry any man if she only wills to do so; and from the day when she was seventeen, and they had had a picnic at Dunaston, she had made up her mind to marry Edgar Harrowby. When he came home for good, unmarried and unengaged, she knew that she should succeed; and Edgar knew it too. He knew it so well after he had been at home about a week that if anything could have turned him against the wife carved out for him by circumstance and fitness, it would have been the almost fatal character of that fitness, as if Fortune had not left him a choice in the matter.

"And what do you think of Adelaide?" asked Mrs. Harrowby one day when her son said that he had been to the rectory. "You have seen her twice now: what is your impression of her?'"

"She is prettier than ever—improved, I should say, all through," was his answer.

Mrs. Harrowby smiled. "She is a girl I like," she said. "She is so sensible and has such nice feeling about things."

"Yes," answered Edgar, "she is thoroughly well-bred."

"We have seen a great deal of her of late years," Mrs. Harrowby continued, angling dexterously. "She and the girls are fast friends, especially she and Josephine, though there is certainly some slight difference of age between them. But Adelaide prefers their society to that of any one about the neighborhood. And I think that of itself shows such good taste and nice feeling."

"So it does," said Edgar with dutiful assent, not exactly seeing for himself what constituted Adelaide's good taste and nice feeling in this preference for his dull and doleful sisters over the brighter companionship of the Fairbairns, say, or any other of the local nymphs. To him those elderly maiden sisters of his were rather bores than otherwise, but he was not displeased that Adelaide Birkett thought differently. If it "ever came to anything," it would be better that they satisfied her than that she should find them uncongenial.

"She is coming up to dinner this evening," Mrs. Harrowby went on to say; and Edgar smiled, pulled his moustaches and looked half puzzled if wholly pleased.

"She is a pretty girl," he said with the imbecility of a man who ought to speak and who has nothing to say, also who has something that he does not wish to say.

"She is better than pretty—she is good," returned Mrs. Harrowby; and Edgar, not caring to discuss Adelaide on closer ground with his mother, strolled away into his private room, where he sat before the fire smoking, meditating on his life in the past and his prospects in the future, and wondering how he would like it when he had finally abjured the freedom of bachelorhood and had taken up with matrimony and squiredom for the remainder of his natural life.

Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of passion.

"You are such a dear, good punctual girl!" said Josephine affectionately—Josephine, whose virtues had a few more, loose ends and knots untied than had her friend's.

"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and disorder."

"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.

Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this," she said quietly.

"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.

Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the beginning?—if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?

"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in the doorway.

Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.

"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were punctual too," she explained cheerfully.

"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.

"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.

"Which shows that you have by the grace of nature what I have attained only by discipline and art," said Edgar gallantly.

Adelaide smiled. She did not disdain the compliment. On the contrary, she wished to impress it on Edgar that she accepted his praises because they were her due. She knew that the world takes us if not quite at our own valuation, yet as being the character we assume to be. It all depends on our choice of a mask and to what ideal self we dress. If we are clever and dress in keeping, without showing chinks or discrepancies, no one will find out that it is only a mask; and those of us are most successful in gaining the good-will of our fellows who understand this principle the most clearly and act on it the most consistently.

The evening was a pleasant one for Adelaide, being an earnest of the future for which, if she had not worked hard, she had controlled much. Edgar sang solos to her accompaniment, and put in his rich baritone to her pure if feeble soprano; he played chess with her for an hour, and praised her play, as it deserved: naturally, not thinking it necessary to make love to his sisters, he paid her almost exclusive attention, and looked the admiration he felt. She really was a very pretty young woman, and she had unexceptionable manners; and having cut himself adrift from his ties and handsomely released himself from his obligations, he was not disposed to take much trouble in looking far afield for a wife when here was one ready-made to his hand. Still, he was not so rash as to commit himself too soon. Fine play is never precipitate; and even the most lordly lover, if an English gentleman, thinks it seemly to pretend to woo the woman whom he means to take, and who he knows will yield.

And on her side Adelaide was too well-bred for the one part, and too wise for the other, to clutch prematurely at the prize she had willed should be hers. Her actions must be like her gestures, graceful, rhythmic, rather slow than hurried, and bearing the stamp of purpose and deliberation. When Edgar should make his offer, as she knew he would, she would ask for time to reflect and make up her mind. This would be doing the thing properly and with due regard to her own dignity; for no husband of hers should ever have cause to think that she held her marriage with him as a thing so undeniably advantageous there was no doubt of her acceptance from the first. Every woman must make herself difficult, thought Adelaide, if she wishes to be prized, even the woman who for seven years has fixed her eyes steadily on one point, and has determined that she will finally capture a certain man and land him as her lifelong possession.

Thus the evening passed, with a subtle undercurrent of concealed resolves flowing beneath its surface admiration that gave it a peculiar charm to the two people principally concerned—the one feeling that she had advanced her game by an important move; the other, that the eternal fitness of things 'was making itself more and-more evident, and that it was manifest to all his senses whom Providence had destined for his wife, and for what ultimate matrimonial end he had been shaped and spared.

A book of photographs was on the table.

"Are you here?" asked Edgar, lowering his bright blue eyes on Adelaide as she sat on a small chair at Mrs. Harrowby's feet, carrying daughterly incense to that withered shrine.

"Yes, I think so," she answered.

He turned the pages carefully—passing over his sisters in wide crinolines and spoon bonnets; his mother, photographed from an old picture, in a low dress and long dropping bands of hair, like a mouflon's ears, about her face; Fred and himself, both as boys in Scotch suits, set stiffly against the table like dolls—with gradual improvement in art and style, till he came to a page where Adelaide's fair vignetted head of large size was placed side by side with another, also vignetted and also large.

"Ah! there you are; and what a capital likeness!" cried Edgar, with the joyous look and accent of one meeting an old friend, giving that gauge of interest which we all unconsciously give when we first see the photograph of a well-known face. He looked at the portrait long and critically. "Only not so pretty," he added gallantly. "Those fellows cannot catch the spirit: they give only the outside forms, and not always these correctly. Here is a striking face," he continued, pointing to Adelaide's companion-picture—a girl with masses of dark hair, dark eyes, large, mournful, heavily fringed with long lashes, and a grave, sad face, that seemed listening rather than looking. "Who is she? She looks foreign."

Adelaide glanced at the page, as if she did not know it by heart. "That? Oh! that is only Leam Dundas," she said with the faintest, finest flavor of scorn in her voice.

"Leam Dundas?" repeated Edgar—"the daughter of that awful woman?"

"Yes, and nearly as odd as the mother," answered Adelaide, still in the same cold manner and with the same accent of superior scorn.

"At least she used to be, you mean, dear, but she is more like other people now," said kindly Josephine, more just than politic.

Adelaide looked at her calmly, indifferently. "Yes, I suppose she is rather less savage than of old," was her reply, "but I do not see much of her,"

"I do not remember to have ever seen her: she must have been a mere child when I was here last," said Edgar.

"She is nineteen now, I think," said Mrs. Harrowby.

"Not more?" repeated Adelaide. "I imagined she was one-and-twenty at the least. She looks so very much older than even this—five or six and twenty, full; dark people age so quickly."

"She seems to be superbly handsome," Edgar said, still looking at the portrait.

"For those who like that swarthy kind of beauty. For myself, I do not: it always reminds me of negroes and Lascars."

Adelaide leaned forward, and made pretence to examine Leam's portrait with critical independence of judgment. She spoke as if this was the first time she had seen it, and her words the thought of the moment resulting.

"There is no negroid taint here," Edgar answered gravely. "It is the face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."

"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most profoundly stupid person you can imagine."

"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.

"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her exact counterpart"

"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"

"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"

"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the remainder of the book.

But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was, had struck his imagination—struck it as none other had done since the time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even, that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if pure and fair, was slightly insipid.

"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room, "how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so horribly jealous."

"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.

"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."

"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest remarks.

Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That would be paying me too high a compliment," he said.

Whereat his three sisters echoed "Compliment!" in various tones of deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind of voice, "Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!"

CHAPTER XXIII.

ON THE MOOR.

It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look of damp and decay about the fields and banks—one of those melancholy days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.

There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren hedgerows. Everything was "sombre, lifeless, mournful", and even Edgar Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.

He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to take the final plunge before long. He was not in love with her, but she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman's respectability, after having had his share of a young man's "fling" in rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most. All the same, he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.

He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when, as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky. She was alone, doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything—just standing there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the rough freshness of the breeze.

The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of strength—not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight, but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity—seemed to mark her out as something different from the herd.

Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the lonely moor.

Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the rest—black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the reception of new impressions.

For, of course, it was Leam—Leam, who, since her return from school, alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor cried, nor quarreled nor made up—neither stood as a model of fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future inconstancies—writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of verses to Ethel to-morrow—but had kept with all the same quiet gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share, and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.

All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself, thoughts and memories were gathering up from the background where they had lain dormant if extant all these years, and through her solitude were getting a vitality which made her stand still in a kind of breathless agony, wondering where they would lead her and in what they would end. At times such a burning sense of sin would flash over her that she felt as if she must confess that hideous fact of her girlish past. It seemed so shameful that she should be living there among the rest, a criminal with the innocent, and not tell them what she was. Then the instinct of self-preservation would carry it over her conscience, and she would press back her thoughts and go out, as to-day, to cool her feverish blood, and grow calm to bear and strong to hold the heavy burden which she had fashioned by her own mad deed and laid for life on her own hands.

If only the ladies had not insisted so strongly on mamma's personality in heaven! if only they had not lighted up her imagination, her loyalty, by this tremendous torch of faith and love! How bitterly she regretted the childish fanaticism which had made her imagine herself the providence of that beloved memory, the avenger of those shadowy wrongs! Oh, if she could undo the past and call madame back to life! She would kiss her now, and even call her mamma if it would please her and papa. So she stood on the hillock facing the north-west, thinking these things and regretting in vain.

As Edgar came riding by his large black hound dashed off to Leam and barked furiously, all four paws planted on the ground as if preparing for a spring. The beast had probably no malice, and might have meant it merely as his method of saying, "Who are you?" but he looked formidable, and Leam started back and cried, "Down, dog! go away!" in a voice half angry and half afraid.

Then Edgar saw the face, and knew who she was. He rode across the turf, calling off his dog, and came up to her. It was an opportunity, and Edgar Harrowby was a man who knew how to take advantage of opportunities. It was in his creed to thank Providence for favorable chances by making the most of them, and this was a chance of which it would be manifestly ungrateful not to make the most. It was far more picturesque to meet her for the first time, as now, on the wild moor on a gusty gray November day, than in the gloomy old drawing-room at the Hill. It gave a flavor of romance and the forbidden which was not without its value in the beginning of an acquaintance with such a face as Leam's. Nevertheless, in spite of the romance that hung about the circumstance, his first words were common-place enough. "I hope my dog has not alarmed you?" he said, lifting his hat.

Leam looked at him with those wonderful eyes of hers, that seemed somehow to look through him. She, standing on her hillock, was slightly higher than Edgar sitting on his horse; and her head was bent as she looked down on him, giving her attitude and gesture something of a dignified assumption of superiority, more like the Leam of the past than of the present. "No, I was not alarmed," she said. "But I do not like to be barked at," she added, an echo of the old childish sense of injury from circumstance that was so quaint and pretty in her half-complaining voice.

"I suppose not: how should you?" answered Edgar with sympathetic energy. "Rover is a good-old fellow, but he has the troublesome trick of giving tongue unnecessarily. He would not have hurt you, but I should be very sorry to think he had frightened you. To heel, sir!" angrily.

"No, he did not frighten me." repeated Leam.

Never loquacious, there was something about this man's face and manner, his masterful spirit underneath his courteous bearing, his look of masculine power and domination, his admiring eyes that fixed themselves on her so unflinchingly—not with insolence, but as if he had the prescriptive right of manhood to look at her, only a woman, as he chose, he commanding and she obeying—that quelled and silenced her even beyond her wont. He was the first gentleman of noteworthy appearance who had ever spoken to her—not counting Alick, nor the masters who had taught her at school, nor Mr. Birkett, nor Mr. Fairbairn, as gentlemen of noteworthy appearance—and the first of all things has a special influence over young minds.

"You are brave to walk so far alone: you ought to have a dog like Rover to protect you," Edgar said, still looking at her with those unflinching eyes, which oppressed her even when she did not see them.

"I am not brave, and I do not care for dogs. Besides, I do not often walk so far as this; but I felt the valley stifling to-day," answered Leam, in her matter-of-fact, categorical way.

"All the same, you ought to have protection," Edgar said authoritatively, and Leam did not reply.

She only looked at him earnestly, wondering against what she should be protected, having abandoned by this time her belief in banditti and wild beasts.

If his eyes oppressed her, hers half embarrassed him. There was such a strange mixture of intensity and innocence in them, he scarcely knew how to meet them.

"It is absurd to pretend that we do not know each other," then said Edgar after a short pause, smiling; and his smile was very sweet and pleasant. "You are Miss Dundas—I am Edgar Harrowby."

"Yes, I know," Leam answered.

"How is that?" he asked, "I knew you from your photograph—once seen not to be forgotten again," gallantly—"but how should you know me?"

Leam raised her eyes from the ground where she had cast them. Those slow full looks, intense, tragic, fixed, had a startling effect of which she was wholly unconscious. Edgar felt his own grow dark and tender as he met hers. If the soul and mind within only answered to the mask without, what queen or goddess could surpass this half-breed Spanish girl, this country-born, unnoted, but glorious Leam Dundas? he thought.

"And I knew you from yours," she answered.

"An honor beyond my deserts," said Edgar.

Not that he thought the notice of a girl, even with such a face as this, beyond his deserts. Indeed, if a queen or a goddess had condescended to him, it would not have been a grace beyond his merits; but it sounded pretty to say so, and served to make talk as well as anything else. And to make talk was the main business on hand at this present moment.

"Why an honor?" asked Leam, ignorant of the elements of flirting.

Edgar smiled again, and this time his smile without words troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and was soon abashed.

Edgar did not see that he had troubled her. Masterful and masculine to an eminent degree, the timid doubts and fears of a young girl were things he could not recognize. He had no point in his own nature with which they came in contact, so that he should sympathize with them. He knew the whole fence and foil of coquetry, the signs of silent flattery, the sweet language of womanly self-conscious love, whether wooing or being won; but the fluttering misgivings of youth and absolute inexperience were dark to him. All of which he felt conscious was that here was something deliciously fresh and original, and that Leam was more beautiful to look at than Adelaide, and a great deal more interesting to talk to.

"If you will allow me, now that I have had the pleasure of meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said, passing by her naïve query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered only by that smile of superior wisdom.

Flinging himself from his horse, he took the bridle in his hand and turned toward home, looking to the girl to accompany him. Leam felt that she could not refuse his escort offered as so much a matter of course. Why should she? It was very pleasant to have some one to walk with—some one not her father, with whom she still felt shy, if not now absolutely estranged; nor yet Alick, in whose pale face she was always reading the past, and who, though he was so good and kind and tender, was her master and held her in his hand. This handsome, courteous gentleman was different from either, and she liked his society and superior ways. And as he began now to talk to her of things not trenching on nor admitting of flirtation—chiefly of the places he had visited, India, Egypt, Italy, Spain—she was not so much abashed by his unflinching looks and masterful manner.

When he entered on Spain and his recollections of what he had seen there, the girl's heart throbbed, and her pale face grew whiter still with the passionate thrill that stirred her. The old blood was in her veins yet, and, though modified, and in some sense transformed, she was still Pepita's daughter and the child of Andalusia. And here was truth; not like that poor wretched madame's talk, which even she had found out to be false and only making believe to know what she did not know. Spain was the name of power with Learn, as it had been with her mother, and she lifted her face, white with its passionate desires, listening as if entranced to all that Edgar said.

It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is my own country!" she cried. "Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like to go there!"

"Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little significantly.

Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made with him.

She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not now," she said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take me."

"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said Edgar.

She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried, taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?"

"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again—Leam wished he would not smile so often—a little aghast at her literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and levity of the modern girl—that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken passion, rich in latent concentrated power.

"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly.

"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.

"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.

"The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar carelessly—"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it."

"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful—the most beautiful of all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a disappointed air and her old injured accent.

Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.

"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me."

Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness, how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not affected.

"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."

His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her; he meant herself—she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.

She was intensely humiliated at her discovery. Not one of those girls who study every feature, every gesture, every point, till there is not a square inch of their personality of which they are not painfully conscious, Leam had never taken herself into artistic consideration at all. She had been proud of her Spanish blood, of her mantilla, her high comb and her fan; but of herself as a woman among women she knew nothing, nor whether she was plain or pretty. Indeed, had she had to say offhand which, she would have answered plain. The revelation which comes sooner or later to all women of the charms they possess had not yet come to her; and Edgar's words, making the first puncture in her ignorance, pained her more by the shock which they gave her self-consciousness than they pleased her by their flattery.

She said no more, but walked by his side with her head held very high and slightly turned away. She was sorry that he had offended her. They had been getting on together so well until he had said this foolish thing, and now they were like friends who had quarreled. She was quite sorry that he had been so foolish as to offend her, but she must not forgive him—at least not just yet. It was very wrong of him to tell her that she was prettier than the true children of the soil; and she resented the slight to Spain and to her mother, as well as the wrong done to herself, by his saying that which was not true. So she walked with her little head held high, and Edgar could get nothing more out of her. When Leam was offended coaxings to make her forget were of no avail. She had to wear through an impression by herself, and it was useless to try for a premature pardon.

Edgar saw that he had overshot the mark, and that his best policy now was absence; wherefore, after a few moments' silence, he remounted his horse, looking penitent, handsome, full of admiration and downcast.

"I hope we shall soon see you at the Hill, Miss Dundas," he said, holding her hand in his for his farewell a little longer than was quite necessary for good breeding or even cordiality.

"I very seldom go to the Hill," answered Leam, looking past his head.

"But you will come, and soon?" fervently.

"Perhaps: I do not know," answered Leam, still looking past his head, and embarrassed to a most uncomfortable extent.

"Thank you," he said, as if he had been thanking her for the grace of his life; and with a long look, lifting his hat again, he rode off, just escaping by a few hundred yards the danger of being met walking with Leam by his sisters and Adelaide Birkett. They were all driving together in the phaeton, and the sisters were making much of their young friend.

At that moment Edgar preferred to be met alone and not walking with Leam. He did not stop the carriage—simply nodded to them all with familiar kindness, as a group of relatives not demanding extra courtesy, flinging a few words behind him as he rode on smiling. Nor did the ladies in their turn stop for Leam, whom they met soon after walking slowly along the road; but Josephine said, as they passed, how pretty Learn looked to-day, and how much softer her face was than it used to be; and Maria, even Maria, agreed with kindly Joseph, and was quite eulogistic on the object of her old disdain. Adelaide sat silent, and did not join in their encomiums.

It would have been a nice point to ascertain if the Misses Harrowby would have praised the girl's beauty as they did had they known that she had grown soft and dewy-eyed by talking of Spain with their brother Edgar, though she had hardened a little afterward when he told her that she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.

During the dinner at the Hill, where Adelaide was one of the family party, Edgar mentioned casually how that he had met Miss Dundas on the moor, and had had to speak to her because of Rover's misbehavior.

"Yes? and what do you think of her?" asked Mrs. Harrowby with a sharp glance.

"I scarcely know: I have hardly seen her as yet," he answered.

"Did she say or do anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him insufferably insolent.

"No, nothing. Is she in the habit of saying or doing extraordinary things?" he answered back, arching his eyebrows and speaking in a well-affected tone of sincere inquiry.

"At times she is more like a maniac than a sane person," said Adelaide, breaking her bread with deliberation. "What can you expect from such a parentage and education as hers?"

Edgar looked down and smiled satirically. "Poor Pepita's sins lie heavy on your mind," he answered.

"Yes, I believe in race," was her reply.

"Mother," then said Edgar after a short silence, "why do you not have Miss Dundas to dine here with Adelaide? It would be more amusing to her, for it must be dull"—turning to their guest and speaking amiably, considerately—"I am afraid very dull—to be so often quite alone with us."

He did not add what he thought, that it was almost indelicate in her to be here so often. He was out of humor with her to-day.

"She is such an uncertain girl we never know how she may be. I had her to stay here once, and I do not want to repeat the experiment," was Mrs. Harrowby's answer.

"But, mamma, that was before she went to school, when she was quite a child. She is so much improved now," pleaded Josephine.

"Good little soul!" said Edgar under his breath.—"Wine, Joseph?" aloud, as his recognition of her good offices.

"And I like coming alone best, thanks," said Adelaide with unruffled calmness. "Leam has never been my friend; indeed, I do not like her, and you all," to the sisters, with a gracious smile and prettily, "have always been my favorite companions."

"Still, she is very lonely, and it would be kind. Besides, she is good to look at," said Edgar.

"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Harrowby with crisp lips and ill-concealed displeasure.

"Do I think so, mother? I should have no eyes else. She is superb. I have never seen such a face. She is the most beautiful creature I have ever known of any nation."

Adelaide's delicate pink cheeks turned pale, and then they flushed a brilliant rose as she laid down her spoon and left her jelly untasted.

There were no trials of skill at chess, no duets, no solos, this evening. After dinner Edgar went to his own room and sat there smoking. He felt revolted at the idea of spending two or three hours with what he irreverently called "a lot of dull women," and preferred his own thoughts to their talk. He sauntered into the drawing-room about ten minutes before Adelaide had to leave, apologizing for his absence on the man's easy plea of "business," saying he was sorry to have missed her charming society, and he hoped they should see her there soon again, and so on—all in the proper voice and manner, but with a certain ring of insincerity in the tones which Adelaide detected, if the others did not. But she accepted his excuses with the most admirable tact, smiling to the sisters as she said, "Oh, we have been very happy, Josephine, have we not? though," with a nice admission of Edgar's claims, not too broadly stated nor too warmly allowed, "of course it would have been very pleasant if you could have come in too."

"It has been my loss," said Edgar.

She smiled "Yes" by eyes, lips and turn of her graceful head. In speech she answered, "Of that, of course, you are the best judge for yourself; but none of us here feel as some girls do, lost without gentlemen to amuse them. We can get on very well by ourselves. Cannot we, Joseph?"

And Josephine said gallantly, "Yes," but her heart was more rueful than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass pleasantly.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CHILD FINA.

Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the fashion to call "the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to the child Fina." If the world which praised her had known all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then? Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right. And this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between these two young creatures there was none, and the girl's maternal instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children pleasant, whatever they may be. Hence, she did nobly when she did her duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then it was only duty, it was not love.

How should it be love? Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with Fina's native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of speech; her pride of race resented her father's adoption of a stranger into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother's rival seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead. Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but never lifting, Fina's changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were intensely wearisome to her. Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.

Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father's heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility to himself—efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and that with her were heroic. For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he gave her the love which would have been Leam's had Pepita been less of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of doll-dressing.

The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her liking—without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure and were in sight; forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent—a child deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused, and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.

The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad that madame's motherless child was not deserted, but had found a substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam, criminal, was not ignoble.

A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr. Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself, and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter. He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little one was.

Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the Harrowbys. He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom. Sebastian liked to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch love to. The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how much soever they desire the former.

Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced. He was booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round. "What a pretty little girl!" he said after a time. True to his type, he was fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him. "Come and speak to me," he continued, holding out his hand to Fina.—"Whose child is she?" vaguely to the company in general.

"Mine," said Mr. Dundas emphatically—"my youngest daughter, Fina Dundas."

Edgar knew what he meant. He had often heard the story from his sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett's comments thereon. He looked then with even more interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.

"Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one," again, coaxingly.

Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily. She let him take her on his knee and kiss her without remonstrance. She was of the kind to like being taken on knees and kissed—especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly women who were soft—and she soon made friends. Not many minutes elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty audacity of six.

"What a dear little puss!" cried Edgar, caressing her. "Very like you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your picture. Is she not, mother?"

"They say so, but I do not see it," answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.

She did not like to hear about this resemblance. There was something in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more so because it was true.

"Poor madame used to say so: she saw it from the first, when Fina was quite a little baby," said Josephine in a low voice.

She was kneeling by her brother's side caressing Fina. She always made love to the little girl: it was one of her methods of making love to the father.

"Is she like her mother?" asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking at the child critically.

"A little," answered Josephine—"not much. It is odd, is it not, that she should be more like me?"

Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar's, and he kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.

"Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before," cried Mrs. Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play at, "I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to my little girl like this." Edgar, who had the Englishman's dislike to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration, laughed too and put Fina away.

But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced to leave him. She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when her stepfather called her. It was a very little matter, but men being weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian beyond measure.

"I hope your elder daughter is well," then said Edgar, emphasizing the adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind, filling his eyes with a strange light.

"Leam? Quite well, thanks. But how do you know anything about her?" was Sebastian's reply.

"I met her yesterday on the moor, and Rover introduced us," answered Edgar laughing.

"How close she is!" said her father fretfully. "She never told me a word about it."

"Perhaps she thought the incident too trifling," suggested Edgar, a little chagrined.

"Oh no, not at all! In a place like North Aston the least thing counts as an adventure; and meeting for the first time one of the neighbors is not an incident to be forgotten as if it were of no more value than meeting a flock of sheep."

Mr. Dundas spoke peevishly. To a man who liked to be amused and who lived on crumbs this reserved companionship was disappointing and tiresome.

"Leam is at home making music," said Fina disdainfully. She had caught the displeased accent of her adopted father, and echoed it.

"Does she make much music?" asked Edgar with his hand under her chin, turning up her face.

The child shrugged her little shoulders. "She makes a noise," she said; and those who heard her laughed.

"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a little gravely.

"No," said Josephine.

"You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put in Sebastian.

Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a noise yourself, papa," she said, pouting. "You made her leave off yesterday as soon as you came in, because you said she made your head ache with her noise, and set your teeth—something, I don't know what."

"Did I, dear?" he repeated carelessly. "Well, we need not discuss the subject. I dare say it amuses her to make music, as you call it, and so we need say no more about it."

"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing on to his knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I think it a noise too."

"Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked Maria, who was a proficient and played almost as well as a "professional." "Four years ago she did not know her notes, and four years' practice cannot be expected to make a perfect pianiste."

"But a person may play very sweetly and yet not be what you call perfect," said Edgar.

"Do you think so?" Maria answered with a frosty smile. "I do not." Of what use to have toiled for thirty years early and late at scales and thorough-bass if a stupid girl like Leam could be allowed to play sweetly after four years' desultory practice? "Adelaide Birkett, if you will, plays well," she added; "but Leam, poor child! how should she?"

"I hope I shall have an opportunity of judging for myself," said Edgar with his company manner.—"When will you come and dine here, Dundas?—to-morrow? You and your elder daughter: we shall be very glad to see you."

He looked to his mother. Mrs. Harrowby had drawn her lips tight, and wore an injured air doing its best to be resigned. This was Edgar's first essay in domestic mastership, and it pained her, not unnaturally.

"Thanks," said Sebastian. "Willingly, if—" looking to Mrs. Harrowby.

"I have no engagement, and Edgar is master now," said that lady.

"And mind that Leam comes too," said Josephine, sharing her favorite brother's action by design.

"And me," cried Fina.

Whereat they all laughed, which made Fina cry, to be consoled only by some sweetmeats which Josephine found in her work-basket.

It was agreed, then, that the next day Leam and her father should dine at the Hill.

"Only ourselves," Edgar said, wanting the excuse of her "being the only lady" to devote himself to Leam. It was strange that he should be so anxious to see her nearer, and in company with his sisters and mother; for after all, why should he? What was she to him, either near or afar off, alone or in the inner circle of his family?

But when the next day came Mr. Dundas appeared alone. Leam had been taken with a fit of shyness, pride—who shall say?—and refused to accept her share of the invitation. Her father made the stereotyped excuse of "headache;" but headaches occur too opportunely to be always real, and Leam's to-night was set down to the fancy side of the account, and not believed in by the hearers any more than by the bearer.

Edgar raged against her in his heart, and decided that she was not worth a second thought, while the ladies said in an undertone from each to each, "How rude!" Maria adding, "How like Leam!" the chain of condemnation receiving no break till it came to Josephine, whose patient soul refrained from wrath, and gave as her link, "Poor Leam! perhaps she is shy or has really a headache."

In spite of his decision that she was not worth a second thought, the impression which Leam had made on Edgar deepened with his disappointment, and he became restless and unpleasant in his temper, casting about for means whereby he might see her again. He cast about in vain. This fit of shyness, pride, reluctance—who knows what?—continued with Leam for many days after this. If she went out at all, she went where she knew she should not be met; and if Edgar called at Ford House, she was not to be found. She mainly devoted herself to Fina and some books lent her by Alick, and kept the house with strange persistency. Perhaps this was because the weather was bad, for Leam, who could bear wind and frost and noonday sun, could not bear wet. When it rained she shut herself up in her own room, and pitied herself for the ungenial skies as she had pitied herself for some other things before now.

Sitting thus reading one miserably dark, cold, misty day, the child Fina came in to her with her lessons, which she repeated well. They were very small and insignificant little lessons, for Leam had a fellow-feeling for the troubles of ignorance, and laid but a light hand on the frothy mind inside that curly head. When they were finished the little one said coaxingly, "Now play with me, Leam! You never play with me."

"What can I do, Fina?" poor Leam replied.

She had never learnt to play when she was a child: she had never built towers and towns, made railway trains and coaches with the sofa and chairs, played at giants through the dark passages and screamed when she was caught. She had only sat still when mamma was asleep, or when she was awake played on the zambomba, or listened to her when she told her of the things of Spain, and made up stories with her dolls that were less edifying than those of Mother Bunch. She could scarcely, however, unpack that old box full of waxen puppets, with the one dressed in scarlet and black, with fishbone horns and a worsted tail, and a queer clumped kind of foot made of folds of leather, cleft in the middle, that used to go by the name of "El señor papa." What could she do?

"Shall I tell you a story?" she then said in a mild fit of desperation, for story-telling was as little in her way as anything else.

"Yes, yes, tell me a story!" Fina clapped her chubby hands together and climbed up into Leam's lap.

"What shall it be about—bears or tigers, or what?" asked Leam dutifully.

"Tell me about mamma, my own mamma, not Aunty Birkett," said Fina.

Leam shuddered from head to foot. This was the first time the little girl had mentioned her mother's name to her. Indeed, she did not know that she had ever heard of her at all—ever known that she had had a mother; but the servants had talked, and the child's curiosity was aroused. The dead mother is as much a matter of wondering inquiry as the angels and the stars; and Fina's imagination was beginning to bestir itself on the mysteries of childish life.

"I have nothing to tell you about her," said Leam, controlling herself, though she still shivered.

"Yes, you have—everything," insisted Fina. "Was mamma pretty?" playing with a corner of her sister's ribbon.

"People said so," answered Leam.

"As pretty as Cousin Addy?" she asked.

"About," said Leam, who thought neither supreme.

"Prettier than you?"

"I don't know: how can I tell?" she answered a little impatiently.

The mother's blood that ran in her, the mother's mould in which she had been formed, forbade her to put herself below madame in anything; but, as she was neither vain nor conscious, she found Fina's question difficult to answer.

"Oh," cried Fina, in a tone of disappointment, "then she could not have been very pretty."

"I dare say she was, but I do not know," returned Leam.

"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent manner.

"Yes, she died."

"Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina.

Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa."

"Did God?"

"I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods were abhorrent and the truth impossible.

"Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.

"Now go," said Leam, putting her off her lap and rising from her chair in strange disorder. "You are troublesome and ask too many questions."

Fina began to cry loudly, and Mr. Dundas, from his library below, heard her. He came up stairs with his fussy, restless kindness, and opened the door of the room where his two daughters, of nature and by adoption, were.

"Heyday! what's all this about?" he cried. "What's the matter, my little Fina? what are you crying for? Tut, tut! you should not cry like this, darling; and, Leam," severely, "you should really keep the child better amused and happy. She is as good as gold with me: with you there is always something wrong."

Fina ran into his arms sobbing. "Leam is cross," she said. "She will not tell me who killed mamma."

The man's ruddy face, reddened and roughened with travel, grew white and pitiful. "God took her away, my darling," he said with a sob. "She was too good for me, and He took her to live with the angels in heaven,"

"And Leam's mamma? Is she in heaven too with the angels?" asked Fina, opening her eyes wide through their tears,

"I hope so," Sebastian answered in an altered voice.

Leam covered her face in her hands; then lifting it up, she said imploringly, "Papa, do not talk to her of mamma. It is sacrilege."

"I agree with you, Leam," said Mr, Dundas in a steady voice. "We meet at the same point, but perhaps by different methods."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]