poor dear! it was terrible for you," sighed the elder woman
sympathetically. "But you must not always mourn, you know. There is
a time for everything, even for forgetting, and for being happy after
sorrow."

"Never a time for me to forget mamma, nor to be happy," said Leam.

"Why not?" answered Mrs. Corfield in her impatient way. "You are
young, nice-looking, in tolerably good health, but you are black
round your eyes to-day. You have friends: I am sure all of us, from my
husband downward, think a great deal of you. And Alick has always been
your friend. Why should you not be happy?"

Leam put the question by. "Yes, you have always been kind to me," she
answered. "I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then.
But I did not understand you as I do now. And how good Alick was! How
sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!" Her
beautiful face grew tender with the thought. She did really love Alick
in her girlish, sisterly way.

Mrs. Corfield looked at her. "Have you never loved any one else as you
loved your poor mother?" she asked.

Leam lifted her eyes. "Never," she answered simply. "I have liked a
few people since, but love as I loved mamma? No!"

"Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must
give me a straightforward answer: Which do you like best, my boy or
Edgar Harrowby?" Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted
to surprise the girl's secret thought rather than have a deliberate
answer.

"I like them differently," began Leam without affectation. "Alick is
so unlike Major Harrowby in every way. And then I have known him so
long--since I was a mere child. I feel that I can say what I like to
him: I always did. But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am--I don't
know: it is all different. I cannot say what I mean." She hesitated,
stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting
on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and
said, "Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield? You should
not."

Mrs. Corfield sighed. If Edgar was undecided between his personal
desires and conventional fitness, she was undecided between her
longing to see Alick happy and her dislike to his being happy in any
way but the one she should design for him. He had raved a good deal
during his illness, and had said many mad things connected with
Leam--always Leam; and since his convalescence his mother had seen
clearly enough