"I do not understand you," said Leam again. "I only know that you are rude: you always are."
She spoke in her most imperturbable manner and with her quietest face. Nothing roused in her so much the old Leam of pride and disdain as these encounters with Adelaide Birkett. The two were like the hereditary foes of old-time romance, consecrated to hate from their birth upward.
"Come, come, fair lady, you are rather hard on our young friend," said Edgar with a strange expression in his eyes—angry, intense, and yet uncertain. He wanted to protect Leam, yet he did not want to offend Adelaide; and though he was angry with this last, he did not wish her to see that he was.
"Dear Leam! I am sure she is very sweet and nice," breathed Josephine; but little Fina, playing with Josephine's chatelaine, said in her childish treble, "No, no, she is not nice: she is cross, and never laughs, and she has big eyes. They frighten me at night, and then I scream. Your are far nicer, Missy Joseph."
Adelaide laughed outright; Josephine was embarrassed between the weak good-nature that could not resist even a child's caressing words and her constitutional pain at giving pain; Edgar tried to smile at the little one's pertness as a thing below the value of serious notice, while feeling all that a man does feel when the woman whom he loves is in trouble and he cannot defend her; but Leam herself said to the child, gravely and without bitterness, "I am not cross, Fina, and laughing is not everything."
"Right, Miss Dundas!" said Edgar warmly. "If the little puss were older she would understand you better. You unconscionable little sinner! what do you mean? hey?" good-humoredly taking Fina by the shoulders.
"Oh, pray don't try and make the child a hypocrite," said Adelaide. "You, of all people in the world, Edgar, objecting to her naïve truth!—you, who so hate and despise deception!"
While she had spoken Fina had crawled over Josephine's lap to the side where Edgar was standing. She put up her fresh little face to be kissed. "I don't like Learn, and I do like you," she said, stroking his beard.
And Edgar, being a man, was therefore open to female flattery, whether it was the frank flattery of an infant Venus hugging a waxen Cupid or the more subtle overtures of a withered Ninon taking God for her latest lover—with interludes.
"But you should like Leam too," he said, fondling her, "I want you to love me, but you should love her as well."