ble to disconcert Edgar Harrowby
so strangely as did this ignorant and innocent half-breed Spanish
girl.

"And friends," repeated Leam. "But they are not much."

"Alick Corfield? He is my good friend," she answered quietly.

"Yes, I know how much you like him." An understanding ear would have
caught the sneering undertone in these words.

"Yes, I like him," responded Leam with unmoved gravity.

"And you are sorry that he is ill--very sorry, awfully sorry?"

"I am sorry."

"Would you be as pained if I were ill? and would you come every day
to the Hill to ask after me, as you go to Steel's Corner to ask after
him?"

"I would be pained if you were ill, but I would not go to the Hill
every day," said Leam.

"No? Why this unfair preference?" he asked.

"Because I am not afraid of Mrs. Corfield," she answered.

"And you are of my mother?"

"Yes. She is severe."

"It is severe in you to say so," said Edgar gently.

"No," said Leam with her proud air. "It is true."

"Then you would not like to be my mother's daughter?" asked Edgar,
both inflamed and troubled.

Leam looked him straight in the face, utterly unconscious of his
secret meaning. "No," she answered, her head held high, her dark eyes
proud and fixed, and her small mouth resolute, almost hard. "I would
like to be no one's daughter but mamma's."

"I do love your fidelity," cried Edgar with a burst of admiration.
"You are the most loyal girl I know."

She turned pale: her head drooped. "Let us talk of something else,"
she said in an altered voice. "Myself is displeasing to me."

"But if it pleases me?"

"That is impossible," said Leam. "How can it please you?"

Was it craft? was it indifference? or was it honest ignorance of the
true motive of a man's words and looks? Edgar pondered for a moment,
but could come to no definite conclusion save rejection of that one
hypothesis of craft. Leam was too savagely direct, too uncompromising,
to be artful. No man who understood women only half so well as Edgar
Harrowby understood them could have credited such a character as hers
with deception.

He wavered, then, between the alternative of indifference or
ignorance. If the one, he felt bound by self-respect to overcome
it--that self-respect which a man of his temperament puts into his
successes with women; if the other, he must enlighten it. "Does it not
please you to talk of those you like?" he asked after a short pause.

"Yes," said Leam, her face s