But young and so beautiful as she was, her little tricks of pride and arbitrariness were just so many additional charms to Alick; and if she had not flouted and commanded him, he would have thought that something terrible was about to happen: had she become docile, grateful, familiar, he would have expected her to die before the day was out. He liked her superb assumption of superiority. She was his girl-queen, and he was her slave; she was his mistress, and he was her dog; and, dog-like, he fawned at her feet even when she rated him and placed her little foot on his neck. CHAPTER XIX. AT STEEL'S CORNER. "I hope you will not be bored, my boy, but I am thinking of bringing that wretched Leam Dundas here for a few days. I don't like a girl of her age and character to be left for a full month alone. It is not right, for who knows what she may not do? If she ran away on the wedding-day, she may run away again, and then where would we all be? I cannot think what her father was about to leave her unprotected like this. So I shall just take and bring her here; and if you are bored with her, you must make the best of it." Mrs. Corfield and Alick were sitting in the "work-room" on the morning of the fifth day after the marriage, when the thought struck the little woman of the propriety of Leam's visit to them for the month of her father's absence. She did not see her son's face when she spoke, being busy with her wood-carving. If she had, she would not have thought that the presence of Leam Dundas would bore or annoy him. The clumsy features gladdened into smiles, the dull eye brightened, the dim complexion flushed: if ever a face expressed supreme delight, Alick's did then; and it expressed what he felt, for, as we know, the one love of his boyish life was this girl-queen of his fancy. Not that he was in love with her in the ordinary sense of being in love. He was too reverent and she too young for vulgar passion or commonplace sentiment. She was something precious to his imagination, not his senses, like a child-queen to her courtier, a high-born lady to her page. He bore with her girlish temper, her girlish insolence of pride, her ignorant opposition, with the humility of strength bending its neck to weakness--the devotion and unselfish sweetness characteristic of him in other of his relations than those with Leam. Judge, then, if he was likely to be bored, as his mother feared, or if this project of a closer domestication with her was not rather a "bit of blue" in his sky which made these early autumn days gladder than the gladdest summer-time.