uddenly softening into tenderness as she
thought of her mother; of whom Edgar did not think. "Talk to me of
Spain and all that you did there."

"And that would be of what you like?" he asked.

"Of what I love," returned Leam in a low voice, her eyes lifted to
his, soft and humid.

"How can I read you? What can I think? What do you want me to
believe?" cried Edgar in strange trouble.

"What have I said?" she asked with grave surprise. "Why do you speak
like this?"

"Are you playing with me, or do you want me to understand that you
have made me happy?" he cried, his face, voice, bearing, all changed,
all full of an unknown something that half allured and half frightened
her.

She turned aside her head with her cold, proud, shrinking air. "I am
not playing with you; and you are silly to say I have made you happy,"
she said, shaking her reins lightly and quickening her chestnut's
uneasy pace; and Edgar, quickening the pace of his heavy bay,
thought it wiser to let the moment pass, and so stand free and still
wavering--in doubt and committed to nothing.

Thus the time wore on, with frequent meetings, always crowded
with doubts and fears, hopes, joys, displeasures in a tangled heap
together, till the drying winds of March set in and cleared off the
last of the fever, which had by now worn itself away, and by degrees
the things of North Aston went back to their normal condition. The
families came into residence again, and save for the widow's wail and
the orphan's cry in the desolated village below, life passed as it had
always passed, and the strong did not spend their strength in bearing
the burdens of the weak.

The greatest social event that had taken place in consequence of
the epidemic was, that Mr. Dundas had made acquaintance with his new
tenant at Lionnet. Full of painful memories for him as the place was,
he could not let the poor fellow die, he said, with no Christian soul
near him. As a landlord he felt that he owed this mark of humanity to
one of whom, if nothing absolutely good was known, neither was there
anything absolutely bad, save that negative misdemeanor of not coming
to church. As this was not an unpardonable offence to a man who had
traveled much if he had thought little, Mr. Dundas let his humanity
get the upper hand without much difficulty. By which it came about
that he and his new tenant became friends, as the phrase goes, and
that thus another paragraph was added to the restricted page of