tion.

She looked at the flowers with which the wood was golden and azure.
"Yes," was her not too eloquent assent.

"And you have been sorry?"

"Every one has been sorry," said Leam evasively.

"Yes, you have been sorry," he repeated: "I have read it in your
face."

He had done nothing of the kind: he had guessed it from the fact of
her daily visits, and he had surmised a special interest from that
other group of facts which had first set him thinking--namely, that
Steel's Corner owned a laboratory--two, for the matter of that; that
old Dr. Corfield was a clever toxicologist; that Leam had stayed there
during her father's honeymoon; and that her stepmother had died on
the night of her arrival. "And your average Englishman calls himself
a creature with brains and inductive powers!" was his unspoken
commentary on the finding of the coroner's jury and the verdict of the
coroner. "Bull is a fool," the old heathen used to think, hugging his
own superior sagacity as a gift beyond those which Nature had allowed
to Bull in the abstract.

"I have known him since I was a child. Of course, I have been sorry,"
said Leam coldly.

She disliked being questioned as much as being touched. The two,
indeed, were correlative.

"Early friendships are very dear," said Mr. Gryce, watching her. He
was opening the vein of another idea which he had long wanted to work.

She was silent.

"Don't you think so?" he asked.

"They may be," was her reluctant answer.

"No, they are--believe me, they are. The happiest fate that man or
woman can have is to marry the early friend--transform the playmate of
childhood into the lover of maturity, the companion of age."

Leam made no reply. She was afraid of this soft-voiced, large-eyed,
benevolent old man who seemed able to read the hidden things of life
at will. It disturbed her that he should speak at this moment of the
happiness lying in the fulfillment of youthful friendship by the way
of mature love; and, proud and self-restrained as her bearing was, Mr.
Gryce saw through the calmer surface into the disturbance beneath.

"Don't you think so?" he asked for the second time.

"How should I know?" Leam answered, raising her eyes, but not looking
into her companion's face--looking an inch or two above his head. "I
have seen too little to say which is best."

"True, my child, I had forgotten that," he said kindly. "Will you take
my word for it, then, in lieu of your own experience?"

"Th