understand things yet."

"I understand that I love mamma, and will not have this wicked woman
in her place," said Leam hotly.

"I think you will," he answered, playing with his watch-guard. "And in
the future, my little daughter, you will thank me."

"Thank you? For what?" asked Leam. "You made mamma miserable when she
lived: you and your madame helped to kill her, and now you put this
woman in her place! Papa, I wonder Saint Jago lets you live."

"As Saint Jago is kind enough to leave me in peace, perhaps you
will follow his example. What a saint allows my little daughter may
accept," said Mr. Dundas mockingly.

"No," said Leam with pathetic solemnity, "if the saints forget mamma,
I will not."

"My dear, you are a fool," said Mr. Dundas.

"You may call me what you like, but madame shall not be my mother,"
returned Leam.

"Madame will be your mother because she will be my wife," said
Mr. Dundas slowly. "Unfortunately for you--perhaps for myself
also--neither you nor I can alter the law of the land. The child must
accept the consequences of the father's act."

"Then I will kill her," cried Leam.

Her father laughed gayly. "I think we will brave this desperate
danger," he said. "It is a fearful threat, I grant--an awful
peril--but we must brave it, for all that."

"Papa," said Leam, "I will pray to the saints that when you die you
may not go to heaven with mamma and me."

It was her last bolt, her supreme effort at threat and entreaty, and
it meant everything. If her words of themselves would have amused
Mr. Dundas as a child's ignorant impertinence, the superstition of an
untaught, untutored mind, her looks and manner affected him painfully.
True, he did not love her--on the contrary, he disliked her--but, all
the same, she was his child; and, dissected, realized, it was rather
an awful thing that she had said. It showed an amount of hatred and
contempt which went far beyond his dislike for her, and made him
shudder at the strength of feeling, the tenacity of hate, in one so
young.

If more absurdity than good sense is talked about natural affection,
still there is a residuum of fact underneath the folly; and Leam's
words had struck down to that small residuum in her father's heart. It
was not that he was wounded sentimentally so much as in his sense of
proprietorship, his paternal superiority, and he was angry rather than
sorrowful. It made him feel that he had borne with her waywardness
long enough