"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.