colors and the gilding, the flowers and the emblems, pleased her, and she took the texts sandwiched between as the jalap in the jam.  At first she thought it impious to have them there at all, because they were in the Bible, and mamma used to say that good Christians never read the Bible.  It was a holy book which only priests might use, and when those pigs of Protestants looked into it and read it, just as they would read the newspaper, they profaned it.  But by force of habit she reconciled herself to the profanity, and by frequent looking at the art got the literature into her head.  And when it was there she did not find anything in it to be afraid of or to condemn as too mysteriously holy for her knowledge.  All of which was so much to the good; and Mr. Dundas had no words strong enough whereby to express his gratitude to the fair woman who had saved his child from destruction by giving her the Ten Commandments made pretty by adjuncts of bastard art.

But had it not been for Alick Corfield, Madame la Marquise de Montfort would not have made quite so much way.  Alick and Leam used to meet in Steel’s Wood; and when Leam carried her perplexities to Alick, and Alick told her that she ought to yield and gave her the reasons why, after first fiercely combating him, telling him he was stupid, wicked, unkind, she always ended by promising to obey; and when Leam promised the things agreed to might be considered done.  In point of fact, then, it was Alick who was really moulding her, in excess of that unconscious plasticity and imitation already spoken of.  But this was one of the things which the world did not know, and where judgment went awry in consequence.

Of course the neighborhood saw what was coming—­what must come, indeed, by the very force of circumstances.  The friendship which had sprung up from the first between Mr. Dundas and madame could not stop at friendship now, when both were free and evidently so necessary to each other.  For madame, with that noble frankness backed by wise reticence characteristic of her, had told every one of her loss by which she had been necessitated to become Leam’s governess; always adding, “So that I am glad to be able to work, seeing that I am obliged to do so, as I could not borrow, even for a short time:  I am too proud for that, and I hope too honest.”

Wherefore, as she was evidently Leam’s salvation, according to her own account, and Sebastian was confessedly her income, and a very good one too, there was no reason why their several lines should not coalesce in an indissoluble union, and one home be made to serve them instead of two.  As indeed it came about.

When the year of conventional mourning had been perfected, on the anniversary of the very day when poor Pepita died, the final words were said, the last frail barrier of madame’s conjugal memories and widowed regrets was removed, and Sebastian Dundas went home the gladdest man in England.  All that long bad past was now to be redeemed, and he had made a good bargain with life to have passed through even so much misery to come at the end into such reward.