ess of soul--would soften poor Leam
into loving acceptance of what would be so much to her good when she
could be got to understand it. Meanwhile they must be patient--content
to go gradually and gain her bit by bit. She, madame, would be
quite content with her presence in the room, when they returned to
breakfast, in the pretty white muslin frock ordered from town as the
sign of her participation in the event.

But when the morning came, where was Leam? The most diligent search
failed to discover her, and the only person who could have betrayed
her whereabouts was the last whom they would have thought of asking.

Of course, Mr. Dundas was properly distressed at this strange
disappearance, and madame was unduly afflicted. She proposed that the
marriage should be delayed till the girl was found, but the lover was
stronger than the father, and she was overruled--yielding because it
is the duty of the wife to yield, but only because of that duty--for
her own part desirous of delay until they were assured of the safety
of Leam.

The ceremony, however, was performed within the canonical hours, the
rector a little tremulous and apparently suffering from sore throat;
and as the happy pair drove away, madame, remembering her advent and
her objects more than a year ago now, could not but confess that she
had done better than she expected, and, her conscience whispered,
better than she deserved.

All this time Leam was sitting on the lower branches of the yew tree
beneath which that godless ruffian had murdered his poor sweetheart
two generations ago in Steel's Wood. It was a lonely corner, where no
one would have gone by choice at the best of times, but now, with its
bad name and evil association, it was entirely deserted. Leam had made
it her hiding-place ever since madame had taken her in hand to teach
her the correct pronunciation of Shibboleth, and she had escaped
from her teaching and run away into the wood, armed banditti and wild
beasts notwithstanding. And one day, hunting in it for fungi, Alick
Corfield had found her sitting there, and thenceforth they had shared
the retreat between them.

No one knew that they met there, and no one suspected it--not even
Mrs. Corfield, who believed, after the manner of mothers who bring up
their boys at home, that she knew the whole of her son's life from end
to end, and that he had not a thought kept back from her, nor had ever
committed an action of which she was not cognizant.