, 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 Learn 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, bin: 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 Learn 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 cu