clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's
child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his
own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only
for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him. It
was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he
gave her the love which would have been Leam's had Pepita been less
of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of
doll-dressing.

The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque
Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily
amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was
but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her
liking--without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and
born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure
and were in sight; forgetting yesterday's joys as though they had
never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent--a child
deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively
diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on
and the flower set into the fruit. Epitomizing the characteristics of
the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the
pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused,
and who liked with a woman's liking to be loved.

The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been
satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and
the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his
little daughter by adoption was almost a passion. If Leam could have
been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of
her father and Fina. But she was not. On the contrary, it seemed to
soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad
that madame's motherless child was not deserted, but had found a
substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam,
criminal, was not ignoble.

A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr.
Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him. Leam had a fit of
shyness and refused to go: thus Sebastian had the child to himself,
and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter.
He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great
deal better than he ever expected she would