Presently he said, tempting her with the lover's affectation of distrust: "I do not think you love me really, my Leam!" bending over her as if he would have folded her to his heart. Had she been any but Leam he would. But the love-ways that came so easy to him were lessons all unlearnt as yet by her, and be respected both her reticence and her reluctance.

"Not love you?" she said with soft surprise. "I not love you?" "Do you?" he asked.

She was silent for a moment.

"I do love you," she said in her quiet, intense way. "I do not talk; you know that; but if I could make you happy by dying for you I would. I love you, oh! I cannot say how much! I seem to love God and all the saints, the sun and the flowers, Spain, our Holy Mother, and mamma in you. You are life to me. I seem to have loved you all my life under another name. When you are with me I have no more pain or fear left. You are myself-more than myself to me!"

"My darling! and you to me!" cried Edgar.

But his voice, though sweet and tender, had not the passionate ring of hers, and his face, though full of the man's bolder love, had not the intensity which made her so beautiful, so sublime. It was all the difference between the experience which knew the whole thing by heart and which cared for itself more than for the beloved, and the wholeness, the ecstacy of the first and only love born of a nature single, simple, and concentrated.

Adelaide, watching and listening behind the broken wall, saw and heard it all. Her head was on fire, her heart had sunk like lead; she could not stay any longer assisting thus at the ruin of her life's great hope; she had already stayed too long. As she stole noiselessly away, her white dress passing a distant opening looked ghastly, seen through the rising mist which the young moon faintly silvered.

"What is that!" cried Leam, a look of terror on her pale face as she rapidly crossed herself. "It is the Evil Sign!"

"No," laughed Edgar, profiting by the moment to take her in his arms, judging that if she was frightened she would be willing to fecl sheltered. "It is only one of the ladies passing to go down. Perhaps it is Adelaide Birkett. I think it was."

"And that would be an evil sign in itself!" said Leam, still shuddering. And yet how safe she felt with his arms about her like this! "Poor dear Addy! why should she be an ill omen to you, you dear little fluttering frightened dove?"

"She hates me; always has, so long as I can remember her," answered Leam. "And you are her friend," she added.

"Her friend-yes, but not her lover, as I am yours; not her future husband!" said Edgar.

Leam's hand touched his softly, with a touch that was as fleeting and subtle as her smile.

"A friend is not a wife, you know," he continued. "And you are to be my wife, my own dear and beloved little wife, always with me, never parted again."

"Never parted again! Ah! I shall never be unhappy then!" she murmured.

A flash of summer lightning broke through the pale faint moonlight, and lighted up the old grey towers with a lurid glow.

Leam was not usually frightened at lightning, but now, perhaps because her whole being was overwrought and strung, she started and crouched down with a sense of awe strangely unlike her usual self.

"Come! we are going to have a storm," said Edgar, whom every manifestation of weakness claiming his superior protection infinitely pleased, and seemed to endear her yet more to him. "We must be going, my darling, else I shall have you caught in the rain. We shall just have time to get to the rectory before it comes on, and they are waiting for us."

"I would rather not go to the rectory to-night," said Leam with a sudden return to her old shy self.

"No? why, my sweet?" he said lovingly. "How can I live through the evening without you?"

"Can you not? Do you really wish me to go?" she answered seriously.

"Of course I wish it; how should I not? But tell me why you raise an objection. Why would you rather not go?"

"I would rather be alone and think of you than only see you at the rectory with all those people," she answered simply.

"But we have had all the people about here, and yet we have been pretty much alone," he said.

"We could not be together at the rectory, and "--she blushed, but her eyes were full of more than love as she raised them to his face-"I could not bear that any one should come between us to-day. Better be alone at home, where I can think of you with no one to interrupt me."

"It is a disappointment, but who could refuse such a plea and made in such a voice?" said Edgar, who felt that perhaps she was right in her instinct, and who at all events knew that he should be spared something that would be a slight effort in Adelaide's own house. "I shall spoil you, I know; but I cannot refuse you anything when you look like that. Very well; you shall go home if you wish it, my beloved; and I will make your excuses."

"Thank you," said Leam, with the sweetest little air of humbleness and patience.

"How could that fool Sebastian Dundas say she was difficult to manage, and how can Adelaide see in her the possibility of anything like wickedness! She is the most loving and tractable little angel in the world. She will give me no kind of trouble, and I shall be able to mould her from the first and do what I like with her."

These were Edgar's thoughts as he took Leam's hand on his arm, holding it there tenderly pressed beneath his other hand, while he said aloud: "My darling, my delight! if I had had to create my ideal I should have made you. You are everything I most love!"—and again he said as so often before, "the only woman I have ever loved or ever could love.” And Leam believed him.

Adelaide accepted Major Harrowby's excuses for Miss Dundas's sudden headache and fatigue gallantly, as she had accepted her position through the day; she showed nothing, expressed nothing, but bore herself with consummate ease and self-possession. She won Edgar's admiration for her tact and discretion, for the beautiful results of good breeding. He congratulated himself on having such a friend as Adelaide Birkett. She would be of infinite advantage to Leam when his wife, and when he had persuaded that sweet doubter to believe in her and accept her as she was, and as he wished her to be accepted. As it was in the calendar of his wishes at this moment that Adelaide had never loved him, never wished to marry him, he dismissed the belief which he had cherished so long as if it had never been, and decided that it had been a mistake throughout. She was just his friend-no more, and never had been more. He was not singular in his determination to find events as his desires ruled them. It is a pleasant way of shuffling off self-reproach, and of excusing one's own fickleness.

Edgar just now believed as he wished to believe, and shut out all the rest. As he lit his last cigar, sitting on the terrace at the Hill and watching the sheet-lightning on the horizon, he thought with satisfaction on the success of his life. Specially he congratulated himself on his final choice. Leam would make the sweetest little wife in the world, and he loved her passionately. But "spooning" was exhausting work; he would cut it short and marry her as soon as he could get things together. And then his thoughts wandered away to some other of his personal matters; and while Leam was living over the day hour by hour, word by word, he had settled the terms for Farmer Mason's new lease, had decided to rebuild the North Lodge, which was ugly and incommodious; and on this, something catching the end of that inexplicable association of ideas, he wondered how some one whom he had left in India was going on, and what had become of Violet Cray.

CHAPTER XVI.

IN LETTERS OF FIRE.

THE storm which had threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent; the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to nature. Leam, however, interpenetrated by her love which gave what it felt and saw what it

brought, always remembered this early day as the ideal of peace and softness, where was no prophecy of coming evil, no shadow of the avenging hand stretched out to punish and destroy-only peace and softness, love, joy, and rest.

pas

The grey background of the heavy sky, which to others was heavy and gloomy, was to her the loveliest expression of repose; and the absence of sunlight was as grateful as a veil drawn against the glare. If not beautiful in itself, it added beauty to other things; witness the sionate splendour given by it to the flowers, which seemed by contrast to gain a force and vitality of colour, a richness and significance they never had before. She specially remembered in days to come a bed of scarlet poppies that glowed like so many cups of flame against the dark masses of evergreens behind them; and the scarlet geraniums, the bold bosses of the blood-red peonies, the fiery spathes of salvia and gladiolus, the lowlying verbenas like rubies cast on the green leaves and brown earth, the red gold-flame-colour streaked with lines of blood-of the nasturtiums festooning the bordering wires of the centre beds, all seemed to come out like spires of flame or rosettes dyed in blood, till the garden was filled with only those two colours-the one of fire and the other of blood.

But though Leam remembered this in after-days, as the weird prophecy of what was to come, at the time those burning beds of flowers simply pleased her with their brilliant colouring; and she sat in her accustomed place on the garden-chair, under the cut-leaved hornbeam, and looked at the garden stretching before her with the fresh, surprised kind of admiration of one who had never seen it before-as if it told her something different to-day from what it had in times past; as indeed it did!

Presently Edgar came down from the Hill. He had not told his people yet of the double bond which he designed to make between the two houses. He thought it was only fitting to wait until Sebastian had returned and he had gained the paternal consent in the orthodox way. And the false air of secresy which this temporary reticence gave his engagement gave it also a false air of romance which exactly suited his temperament in the matter of love. Perhaps, for the woman destined to be his wife, he would have preferred to dispense with this characteristic of his dealings with those other women, her predecessors, not destined to be his wives. All the same it was delightful, as things were, to come down to Ford House on this sultry day and sit under the shadow of the hornbeam, with Leam looking her loveliest by his side, and butterfly-like Fina running in and out in the joyous way of a lively child fond of movement and not afflicted with shyness; delightful to feel that he was enacting a little poem unknown to all the world beside; that he was the magician who had first wakened this young soul into life and taught it the sweet suffering of love; and delightful to know that he was king and supreme, the only man concerned, with not even a father to share, just yet, his domain.

Edgar, at all times charming, because at all times good-humoured and not inconveniently in earnest, when specially pleased with himself was one of the most delightful companions to be found. He had seen much, and he talked pleasantly on what he had seen, whipping up the surface of things dexterously, and not forcing his hearers to digest the substance. Hence he was never a bore, nor did he disturb the placid shallows of ignorance by an unwelcome influx of information. He had just so much of the histrionic element, born of vanity and self-consciousness, as is compatible with the impassive quietude prescribed by good breeding, whereby his manner had a colour that was an excellent substitute for sincerity, and his speech a pictorial glow that did duty for enthusiasm when he thought fit to simulate enthusiasm. He had, too, that sensitive tact which seems to feel weak places as if by instinct; and when he was at his best his good-nature led him to avoid giving pain and to affect a sympathetic air, which was no more true than his earnestness. But it took the uncritical and the affectionate, and Major Harrowby was quoted by many as an eminently kind and tender-hearted man.

To women he had that manner of subtle deference and flattering admiration characteristic of men who make love to all women-even to children in the bud, and to matrons more than full-blown-and who are consequently idolised by the sex all round. And when this natural adorer of many laid himself out to make special love to one, he was, as we know, irresistible. He was irresistible to-day. He was really in love with Leam; and if his love had not the intensity, the tenacity of hers, yet it was true of its kind; and for him very true.

But he was not so much in love as to be unconscious of the most graceful way of making it; consequently he knew exactly what he was doing and how he looked and what he said, while Leam, sitting there by bis side, drinking in his words as if they were heavenly utterances, forgot all about herself and lived only in her speechless, her unfathomable adoration of the man she loved. Her life at this moment was one pulse of voiceless happiness; it was one strain of sensation, emotion, passion, love; but it was not conscious thought nor yet perception of outward things by her senses.

If yesterday at Dunaston had been a day of blessedness, this was its twin sister, and the better favoured of the two. There was a certain flavour of domesticity in these quiet hours passed together in the garden, interrupted only by the child as she ran hither and thither breaking in on them, sometimes not unpleasantly when speech was growing embarrassed because emotion was growing too strong, that seemed to Leam the sweetest experience which life could give her were she to live for ever; and the sunless stillness of the day suited her nature even better than the gayer glory of yesterday. To-day, too, it was still more peace in her inner being and still less unrest. The more accustomed she was becoming to the strange fact of loving and being loved by a man not a Spaniard, and one whom mamma would neither have chosen nor approved of, the more she