nt with her because it reminded her of home.
He firmly fixed it on the bracket destined for it, opposite the couch
where he longed so ardently to see his fair and queenly loved one
sitting--he by her side in the lovers' paradise of secure content; but
the next time he went into the room he found it lying in fragments on
the floor. None of the servants knew how the mischance had happened:
the window was not open, and none of them had been in the room.
How, then, came it there, broken on the floor? When he asked Leam,
wandering by in that pale, feverish, avenging way of hers, he knew the
truth.

"Yes," she said defiantly, "I broke it. It was mamma's, and your
madame shall not have it."

"If you intend to go on like this I shall have you sent to school or
shut up in a lunatic asylum," cried Mr. Dundas in extreme wrath.

"Then I shall be alone with mamma, and shall not see you or your
madame," answered Leam, unconquered.

"You are a hardened, shameful, wicked girl," said her father angrily.
"Madame is an angel of goodness to undertake the care of such a
wretched creature as you are. I could not do too much for her if I
gave her all I had, and you can never be grateful enough for such a
mother."

"She is not my mother, and she shall not pollute mamma's things," Leam
answered with passionate solemnity. "If you give them to her I will
break or burn them. Mamma's things are her own, and she shall not be
made unhappy in heaven."

Provoked beyond himself, Sebastian Dundas said scornfully, "Heaven!
You talk of heaven as if you knew all about it, Leam, like the next
parish. How do you know she is there, and not in the place of torment
instead? Your mother was scarcely of the stuff of which angels are
made."

"Then if she is in the place of torment, she is unhappy enough as
it is, and need not be made more so," said faithful Leam, suddenly
breaking into piteous weeping; adding through her sobs, "and madame
shall not have her things."

Her tenacity carried the day so far that Mr. Dundas left off
rearranging the old, and sent up to London for things new and without
embarrassing memories attached to them. On which Leam swept off all
that had been her mother's, and locked up her treasures in her own
private cupboard, carrying the key in the hiding-place which that
mother had taught her to use, the thick coils of her hair. And her
father, warned by that episode of the vase, and a little dominated,
not to say appalled, by her