iendless, by habit joyless,
and how the soul of such a one seems to throw off its husk like the
enchanted victim of a fairy-tale when the true being that has been
hidden is released by love? It is a transformation as entire as any
wrought by magic word or wand; and it was the transformation wrought
with Leam to-day. She was Leam Dundas truly in all the essential
qualities of identity, but Leam Dundas with another soul, an added
faculty, an awakened consciousness--Leam set free from the darkness of
the bondage in which she had hitherto lived.

"You look like another being: you have looked like this ever since you
told me you loved me," said Edgar, drawing himself a little back and
gazing at her with the critical tenderness of a man's pride and love.
"You are like Psyche wakened out of her sleep, and for the first time
using your wings and living in the upper air."

The metaphor was a little confused, but that did not signify. The
whole image was essentially Greek to Leam, and she only knew that it
sounded well and did somehow apply to her--that she had just awakened
out of sleep, and was for the first time using her wings and living in
the upper air.

"I have not really lived till now," she answered. "And now things seem
different."

"In what way?" asked Edgar, smiling.

He knew what she meant, but he wanted to hear her reveal herself.

She smiled too. "More beautiful," she said, a little vaguely.

"As what? I like to be precise, and I want to know exactly what my
darling thinks and means."

He said this with his most bewitching smile and in his tenderest
voice. It was so pleasant to him to receive these first shy, confused
confessions.

"The flowers and the sky," said Leam, raising her eyes and looking
through the garden and on to the gray and narrowed horizon. "I
remember when flowers were weeds and one day was like another. I did
not know if the sun shone or not. But this year seems now to have been
always summer and sunshine. The very weeds are more lovely than the
flowers used to be."

"Flowers and sunshine since you knew me, my darling?"

"Yes," she answered shyly.

Edgar glanced at the heavy clouds hanging over head, but he did not
say that he found this gray day singularly gloomy and oppressive, and
that even love could not set a fairy sun in the sky. He took up the
second clause of her loving speech: "And I am your flower? What
a precious little compliment! I hope I shall be your amaranth, my
Le