answered gravely. "It is the
face of a sibyl, of a tragedian."

"Do you think so? It is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous
to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is,
there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most
profoundly stupid person you can imagine."

"Not now, Addy: she has wakened up a good deal," again interposed
Josephine with her love of justice and want of tact.

"But do you not see the mother in her, Josephine? I do, painfully; and
the mother was such a horror! Leam is just like her. She will grow her
exact counterpart"

"A bad model enough," said Edgar; "but this face is not bad. It has
more in it than poor old Pepita's. How fat she was!"

"So will Leam be when she is as old," said Adelaide quietly. "And do
you think these dark people ever look clean? I don't,"

"That is a drawback certainly," laughed Edgar, running through the
remainder of the book.

But he turned back again to the page which held Leam and Adelaide side
by side, and he spoke of the latter while he looked at the former. The
face of Leam Dundas, mournful, passionate, concentrated as it was,
had struck his imagination--struck it as none other had done since the
time when he had met that grand and graceful woman wandering, lost in
a fog, in St. James's Park, and had protected from possible annoyance
till he had landed her in St. John's Wood. He was glad that Leam
Dundas lived in North Aston, and that he should see her without
trouble or overt action; and as he handed Adelaide into her carriage
he noticed for the first time that her blue eyes were not quite even,
that her flaxen hair had not quite enough color, and that her face, if
pure and fair, was slightly insipid.

"Poor, dear Adelaide!" he said when he returned to the drawing-room,
"how nice she is! but how tart she was about this Leam Dundas of
yours! Looks like jealousy; and very likely is. All you women are so
horribly jealous."

"Not all of us," said Maria hastily.

"And I do not think that Adelaide is," said Josephine. "She has no
cause; for though Leam is certainly very lovely, and seems to have
improved immensely for being at school, still she and Addy do not come
into collision any way, and I do not see why she should be jealous."

"Perhaps Edgar admired her photograph too much," said Fanny, who
was the stupid one of the three, but on occasions made the shrewdest
remarks.

Edgar laughed, not displeasedly. "That w