me which he was about to utter, with all its
passionate memories, was left unsaid. He remembered in time Leam's
former renunciation of the new mamma whom he had once before proposed.

"I have asked Josephine Harrowby to be my wife," he said after a short
pause. "She has consented, and made me very happy. Let me hope that it
will make you happy too."

He spoke with forced calmness and something of sternness under his
apparent serenity. In heart he was troubled, remembering the past and
half fearing the future. How would she bear herself? Would she accept
his relations pleasantly, or defy and reject as before?

Leam looked at the triad gravely. It was a family group with which she
felt that she had no concern. She was outside it--as much alone as in
a strange country. She knew in that deepest self which does not palm
and lie to us that all her efforts to put herself in harmony with
her life were in vain. Race, education and that fearful memory stood
between her and her surroundings, and she never lost the perception of
her loneliness save when she was with Edgar. At this moment she looked
on as at a picture of love and gladness with which she had nothing
in common; nevertheless, she accepted what she saw, and if not
expansive--which was not her way--was, as her father said afterward,
"perfectly satisfactory." She went up to the sofa slowly and held out
her hand. "You are welcome," she said gravely to Josephine, but the
contempt which she had always had for her father, though she had tried
so hard of late to wear it down, surged up afresh, and she could
not turn her eyes his way. What a despicable thing that must be, she
thought--that thing he called his heart--to shift from one to
the other so easily! To her, the keynote of whose character was
single-hearted devotion, this facile, fluid love, which could be
poured out with equal warmth on every one alike, was no love at
all. It was a degraded kind of self-indulgence for which she had no
respect; and though she did not feel for Josephine as she had felt for
madame--as her mother's enemy--she despised her father even more now
than before.

Also a rapid thought crossed her mind, bringing with it a deadly
trouble. "If Josephine was her stepmother, would Major Harrowby be her
stepfather?" They were brother and sister, and she had an idea that
the family followed the relations of its members. She did not know
why, but she would rather not have Major Harrowby for her stepfat