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."