ew moist and dewy. "Not now," she
said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take
me."

"I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said
Edgar.

She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried,
taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?"

"I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again--Leam
wished he would not smile so often--a little aghast at her
literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful
of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not
understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased
him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and
levity of the modern girl--that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose
existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost
superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was
neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken
passion, rich in latent concentrated power.

"They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly.

"What? who?" was Edgar's answer.

"The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam.

"The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar
carelessly--"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for
all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it."

"Mamma used to say they were so beautiful--the most beautiful of
all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a
disappointed air and her old injured accent.

Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever
seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his
handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers.

"How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me."

Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness,
how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with
a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not
affected.

"Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."

His voice and manner made Leam blush uncomfortably. She was conscious
of something disturbing, without knowing what it was. She first looked
up into his face with the same expression of inquiry as before, then
down to the earth perplexedly, when suddenly the truth came upon her;
he meant herself--she was the prettiest Andalusian he had ever seen.

She was intensely humiliated