n in red coats after a poor
little hare--it is horrid! I think poaching quite right. God gave
beasts and birds to us all alike, and your preserves are robberies. I
would like to save all the foxes, and I hate the dogs when they catch
them;" for be sure she would never learn to call them hounds. What
would he feel? It would be an incongruous kind of thing altogether,
Edgar used to think when meditating on life as seen through the
curling clouds of his cigar.

But he loved her--he loved her: daily with more passion, because
daily holding a stronger check on himself, and so accumulating by
concentration. It was the old combat between love and reason, personal
desires and social feelings, and as yet it was undecided which side
would win. Now it was Adelaide and her exact suitability for her part,
when he would avoid Leam Dundas for days; now it was Leam and his
fervid love for her, his passion of doubt, his fever of longing, when
he would all but commit himself and tempt the fortune of the future
irrevocably.

One day, during this, time of sickness in the village and Edgar's
lonely residence at the Hill, Leam was riding along the Green Lanes,
a pretty bit of quiet country, when she heard the well-known hoofs
thundering rapidly behind her, and in due time Major Harrowby drew
rein at her side. "I saw you from the Sherrington road," he said, his
eyes kindling with pleasure at the meeting.

Leam smiled, that pretty little fluttering smile which was so
peculiarly her own, playing like a flicker of tender sunshine over
her face, but she felt gladder than she showed. It was not her way to
flourish her feelings like flags in the face of men. Her reticence was
part of her dislike to noise and glare. "I am glad to see you," she
returned quietly, her eyes raised for a moment to his.

"I sometimes fear I annoy you by joining you so often," said Edgar.

"No, you do not annoy me," Leam answered.

"It is a pleasure to know at least as much as that," he returned with
a forced laugh.

"Yes? But why should you think that you annoy me?" she asked.

"Oh, perhaps you see too much of me, and so get tired of me. The thing
is possible," he said, stroking his horse's ears.

Leam looked at him as she had looked before, but this time without the
smile. "Are you tired of me that you say so?" she asked.

"No, no, no! How can you say such a thing--how dream it?" cried Edgar.
"How could I be tired of you? Why, you are the sunshine of my life,