Mrs. Dundas came forward to meet her stepdaughter kindly--not warmly, not tumultuously--with her quiet, easy, waxen grace that never saw when things were wrong, and that always assumed the halcyon seas even in the teeth of a gale. For her greeting she bent forward to kiss the girl's face, saying, "My dear child, I am glad to see you," but Leam turned away her head. "I am not glad to see you, and I will not kiss you," she said. Her father frowned, his wife smiled. "You are right, my dear: it is a foolish habit," she said tranquilly, "but we are such slaves to silly habits," she added, looking at the rector and his wife in her pretty philosophizing way, while they smiled approvingly at her ready wit and serene good-temper. "Will you say the same to me, Leam?" asked her father with an attempt at jocularity, advancing toward her. "Yes," said Leam gravely, drawing back a step. "Tell me, Mrs, Birkett, what can be done with such an impracticable creature?" cried Mr. Dundas. "She will come right: in time, dear husband," said the late marquise sweetly; and Mrs. Birkett echoed, looking at the girl kindly, "Oh yes, she will come right in time." "If you mean by coming right, letting you be my mamma, I never will," cried Leam, fronting her stepmother. "Silence, Leam!" cried Mr. Dundas angrily. His wife laid her taper fingers tenderly on his. "No, no, dear husband: let her speak," she pleaded, her voice and manner admirably effective. "It is far better for her to say what she feels than to brood over it in silence. I can wait till she comes to me of her own accord and says, 'Mamma, I love you: forgive me the past'" "You are an angel," said Mr. Dundas, pressing her hand to his lips, his eyes moist and tender. "I always said it," the rector added huskily--"the most noble-natured woman of my acquaintance." "I never will come to you and say, 'Mamma, I love you,' and ask you to forgive me for being true to my own mamma," said Learn. "I am mamma's daughter, no other person's." Mrs. Dundas smiled. "You will be; mine, sweet child," she said. How ugly Leam's persistent hate looked by the side of so much unwearied goodness! Even Mrs. Birkett, who pitied the poor child, thought her tenacity too morbid, too dreadful; and the rector honestly held her as one possessed, and regretted in his own mind that the Church had no formula for efficient exorcism. Believing, as he did, in the actuality of Satan, the theory of demoniacal possession came easy as the explanation of abnormal qualities. Her father raged against himself in that he had given life to so much moral deformity. And yet it was not from him that she inherited "that cursed Spanish blood," he said, turning away with a groan, including Pepita, Leam, all his past with its ruined love and futile dreams, its hope and its despair, in that one bitter word. "Don't say that, papa: mamma and I are true. It is you English that are bad and false," said Leam at bay.