"Yes, poor child! I remember," said Mrs. Corfield with compassion. She forgot that at the time she had thought the girl's love and despair, both the one and the other, exaggerated and morbid. She met her now on the platform of sympathy, and her mind saw what it brought to-day as it had seen what it had brought before, but she was not conscious of the contradiction.
"I thought I should have died too when she did. I wish I had," said Leam, looking up to the sky with dreamy love, as if she still thought to meet her mother's face in the blue depths.
"My poor dear! it was terrible for you," sighed the elder woman sympathetically. "But you must not always mourn, you know. There is a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after sorrow."
"Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy," said Leam.
"Why not?" answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way. "You are young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black round your eyes to-day. You have friends: I am sure all of us, from my husband downward, think a great deal of you. And Alick has always been your friend. Why should you not be happy?"
Leam put the question by. "Yes, you have always been kind to me," she answered. "I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then. But I did not understand you as I do now. And how good Alick was! How sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!" Her beautiful face grew tender with the thought. She did really love Alick in her girlish, sisterly way.
Mrs. Corfield looked at her. "Have you never loved any one else as you loved your poor mother?" she asked.
Leam lifted her eyes. "Never," she answered simply. "I have liked a few people since, but love as I loved mamma? No!"
"Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must give me a straightforward answer: Which do you like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby?" Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted to surprise the girl's secret thought rather than have a deliberate answer.
"I like them differently," began Leam without affectation. "Alick is so unlike Major Harrowby in every way. And then I have known him so long—since I was a mere child. I feel that I can say what I like to him: I always did. But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am—I don't know: it is all different. I cannot say what I mean." She hesitated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and said, "Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield? You should not."