she was, she would have been made the "first
young lady" for the moment, because of her connection with the
bridegroom; but being what she was--Leam--she was merely included with
the rest, and by Adelaide with reluctance.

The day wore on bright and clear. Already it was past two o'clock, but
Leam, irresolute what to do, sat in the garden under the shadow of the
cut-leaved hornbeam, from the branches of which Pepita used to swing
in her hammock, smoking cigarettes and striking her zambomba. One part
of her longed to go, the other held her back. The one was the strength
of love, the other its humiliation. How could she meet Major Harrowby
again? she thought. She had kissed him of her own free will last
night--she, Leam, had kissed him; she had leant against his breast,
he with his arms round her; she had said the sacred and irrevocable
words, "I love you." How could she meet him again without sinking to
the earth for shame? What a strange kind of shame!--not sin and yet
not innocence; something to blush for, but not to repent of; something
not to be repeated, but not to wish undone. And what a perplexed state
of feeling!--longing, fearing to see Edgar again--praying of each
moment as it came that he should not appear; grieved each moment as it
passed that he was still absent.

So she sat in all the turmoil of her new birth, distracted between
love and shame, and not knowing which was stronger--feeling as if in a
dream, but, every now and then waking to think of Dunaston, and should
she go or stay away--when, just as little Fina came running to her,
ready dressed and loud in her insistence that they should set off at
once, the lodge-gates swung back and Edgar Harrowby rode up to the
door. When she saw him dismount and walk across the lawn to where she
sat--though it was what she had been waiting for all the day, hoping
if fearing--yet now that it had come and he was really there, she
wished that the earth would open at her feet, or that she could flee
away and hide herself like a scared hind in her cover. But she could
not have risen had there been even any place of refuge for her.
Breathing with difficulty, and seeing nothing that was before her, she
was chained to her seat by a feeling that was half terror, half
joy--a feeling utterly inexplicable in its total destruction of her
self-possession to reticent Leam, who hitherto had held herself in
such proud restraint, and had kept her soul from all influence
from the w