, her dear child, well cared for and kindly mothered."

Leam raised her eyes with sorrowful skepticism, melancholy contempt.
It was the old note of war, and she responded to it. "I know mamma,"
she said; "I know what she is feeling."

She would have none of their spiritual thaumaturgy--none of that
unreal kind of transformation with which they had tried to modify
their first teaching. There was no satisfaction in imagining mamma
something different from her former self--no more the real, fervid,
passionate, jealous Pepita than those pear-shaped transparent bags,
so logically constructed by Mrs. Corfield's philosopher, are like the
ideal angels of loving fancy. If mamma saw and knew what was going
on here at this present moment--and Mrs. Birkett was not the bold
questioner to doubt this continuance of interest--she felt as she
would have felt when alive, and she would be angry, jealous, weeping,
unhappy.

Mrs. Birkett was puzzled what to say for the best to this
uncomfortable fanatic, this unreasonable literalist. When believers
have to formularize in set words their hazy notions of the feelings
and conditions of souls in bliss, they make but a lame business of it;
and nothing that the dear woman could propound, keeping on the side of
orthodox spirituality, carried comfort or conviction to Leam. Her one
unalterable answer was always simply, "I know mamma: I know what she
is feeling," and no argument could shake her from her point.

At last Mrs. Birkett gave up the contest. "Well, my child," she
said, sighing, "I can only hope that the constant presence of your
stepmother, her kindness and sweetness, will in time soften your
feeling toward her."

Leam looked at her earnestly. "It is not for myself," she said: "it is
for mamma."

And she said it with such pathetic sincerity, such an accent of deep
love and self-abandonment to her cause, that the rector's wife felt
her eyes filling up involuntarily with tears. Wrong-headed, dense,
perverse as Leam was, her filial piety was at the least both touching
and sincere, she said to herself, a pang passing through her heart.
Adelaide would not speak of her if she were dead as this poor ignorant
child spoke of her mother. Yet she had been to Adelaide all that the
best and most affectionate kind of English mother can be, while Pepita
had been a savage, now cruel and now fond; one day making her teeth
meet in her child's arm, another day stifling her with caresses;
treating her