acrifice and generosity? It must be with Adelaide,
he thought, rapidly reviewing his past. He was absolutely safe about
Violet Cray, who had never known his name; and those later Indian
affairs were dead and as good as buried. What, then, did it mean?

"No, not till you have heard me," said Leam in a low voice. "And never
after."

"My darling! what is it?" he repeated.

"You must not call me dear names: I am unworthy," said Leam. "No,"
checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief
that her craze--if it was a craze--went to the visionary side of her own
unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as
she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten
it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner--the manner
of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength
for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion--"I was so
happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and
we must part."

Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to
see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if
grieved not afraid. Leam's little life, so innocent and uneventful as it
must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been
smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to
hint. Grant even that there had been something more between her and
Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear--which was his first
thought--still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very
simple. His wife must be spotless--that he knew, and he would marry none
whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must
be her future--absolute purity--the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood
undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions. He owed it to
himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was,
should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and
sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and
that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that
he ought to take to heart or that should influence him. Yes, he might
smile and not be afraid. And indeed her delicate conscience was another
grace in his eyes. He loved her more than ever for the honesty that must
confess all its little sins. Sweet Leam! Leam having to confess! Leam!
she who was almost