He listened patiently till she ended, then he drew himself up. "Thanks!" he drawled affectedly. "You are very kind both to Miss Dundas and myself. All the world knows that the most vigilant overseer a pretty girl can have is a pretty woman. When the reputation of Miss Dundas is endangered by me, it will then be time for her father to interfere. Meanwhile, thanks! I like her quite well enough to take care of her."
"Now, Adelaide, you have vexed him," said Josephine in dismay as Edgar strode back to where Leam remained waiting for him.
"I have done my duty," said Adelaide, drawing her lips into a thin line and lowering her eyebrows; and her friend knew her moods and respected them.
On this point of warning Edgar against an entanglement with Leam she did really think that she had done her duty. She knew that she wished to marry him herself—in fact, meant to marry him—and that she would probably have been his wife before now had it not been for this girl and her untimely witcheries; but though, naturally enough, she was not disposed to love Leam any the more because she had come between her and her intended husband, she thought that she would have borne the disappointment with becoming magnanimity if she had been of the right kind for Edgar's wife. With Adelaide, as with so many among us, conventional harmony was a religion in itself, and he who despised its ritual was a blasphemer. And surely that harmony was not be found in the marriage of an English gentleman of good degree with the daughter of a dreadful low-class Spanish woman—a girl who at fifteen years of age had prayed to the saints, used her knife as a whanger, and maintained that the sun went round the earth because mamma said so, and mamma knew! No, if Edgar married any one but herself, let him at least marry some one as well fitted for him as herself, not one like Leam Dundas.
For the sake of the neighborhood at large the mistress of the Hill ought to be a certain kind of person—they all knew of what kind—and a queer, unconformable creature like Leam set up there as the Mrs. Harrowby of the period would throw all things into confusion. Whatever happened, that must be prevented if possible, for Edgar's own sake and for the sake of the society of the place.
All of which thoughts strengthened Adelaide in her conviction that she had done what she ought to have done in warning Edgar against Leam, and that she was bound to be faithful in her course so long as he was persistent in his.
Meanwhile, Edgar returned to Leam, who had remained standing in the middle of the road waiting for him. Nothing belonged less to Leam than forwardness or flattery to men; and it was just one of those odd coincidences which sometimes happen that as Edgar had not wished her good-bye, she felt herself bound to wait his return. But it had the look of either a nearer intimacy than existed between them, or of Leam's laying herself out to win the master of the Hill as she would not have laid herself out to win the king of Spain. In either case it added fuel to the fire, and confirmed Adelaide more and more in the course she had taken. "Look there!" she said to Josephine, pointing with her whip across the field, the winding way having brought them in a straight line with the pair left on the road.
"Very bold, I must say," said Josephine; "but Leam is such a child!—she does not understand things as we do," she added by way of apology and defence.
"Think not?" was Adelaide's reply; and then she whipped her ponies and said no more.