“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 would be paying me too high a compliment,” he said.

Whereat his three sisters echoed “Compliment!” in various tones of deprecation, and Josephine added a meaning little laugh for her own share, for which Edgar gave her a kiss, and said in a bantering kind of voice, “Now, Joseph! mind what you are about!”

CHAPTER XXIII.

ON THE MOOR.

It was a gray and gusty day in November, with heavy masses of low-lying clouds rolling tumultuously overhead, and a general look of damp and decay about the fields and banks—­one of those melancholy days of the late autumn which make one long for the more varied circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of life, such as we imagine strange elves and fairies might create.