Leam that
may show you the truth of what I say."

"Fatherly relation! what rubbish!" cried Edgar, irritated out of his
politeness.

Adelaide smiled. "Well, you would be rather a young father for her,"
she answered. "Still, the character of the relation will be, as I say,
fatherly."

Edgar laughed impatiently.

"Society will accept it in that light," said Adelaide gravely, glad to
erect even this barrier of shadows between the man of her choice and
the girl whom she both dreaded and disliked.

And she was right in her supposition. Brother and sister marrying
daughter and father would not be well received in a narrow society
like North Aston, where the restrictions of law and elemental morality
were supplemented by an adventitious code of denial which put Nature
into a strait waistcoat and shackled freedom of action and opinion
with chains and bands of iron. Perhaps it was some such thought as
this on his own part that made Edgar profess himself disgusted with
this marriage, and declare loudly that Sebastian Dundas was not worthy
of such a girl as Josephine. His hearers smiled in their sleeves when
he said so, and thought that Josephine Harrowby, thirty-five years of
age, fat and freckled, was not so far out in her running to have got
at last--they always put in "at last"--the owner of Ford House. It was
more than she might have expected, looking at things all round; and
Edgar was as unreasonable as proud men always are. With the redundancy
of women as we have it in England, happy the head of the house who can
get rid of his superfluous petticoats anyhow in honor and sufficiency.
This was the verdict of society on the affair--the two extremities of
the line wherefrom the same fact was viewed.

As for Josephine herself, dear soul! she was supremely happy. It was
almost worth while to have waited so long, she thought, to have such
an exquisite reward at last. She went back ten years in her life, and
grew quite girlish and fresh-looking, and what was wanting in romance
on Sebastian's part was made up in devotion and adoration on hers.

Sebastian himself took pleasure in her happiness, her adoration, the
supreme content of her rewarded love. It made him glad to think that
he had given so good a creature so much happiness; and he warmed his
soul at his rekindled ashes as a philosophic widower generally knows
how.

Only Leam began to look pitifully mournful and desolate, and to shrink
back into a solitude which Edga