It was a good opening, and the handsome soldier-squire congratulated himself on his lucky hit and serviceable memory. Presently he touched on Andalusia, and Leam, who hitherto had been listening without comment, now broke in eagerly. "That is my own country!" she cried. "Mamma came from Andalusia, beautiful Andalusia! Ah! how I should like to go there!" "Perhaps you will some day," Edgar answered a little significantly. Had she been more instructed in the kind of thing he meant, she would have seen that he wished to convey the idea of a love-journey made with him. She shook her head and her eyes grew moist and dewy. "Not now," she said mournfully. "Poor mamma has gone, and there is no one now to take me." "I will make up a party some day, and you shall be one of us," said Edgar. She brightened all over. "Ah! that would be delightful!" she cried, taking him seriously. "When do you think we shall go?" "I will talk about it," Edgar answered, though smiling again--Leam wished he would not smile so often--a little aghast at her literalness, and saying to himself in warning that he must be careful of what he said to Leam Dundas. It was evident that she did not understand either badinage or a joke. But her very earnestness pleased him for all its oddity. It was so unlike the superficiality and levity of the modern girl--that hateful Girl of the Period, in whose existence he believed, and of whose influence he stood in almost superstitious awe. He liked that grave, intense way of hers, which was neither puritanical nor stolid, but, on the contrary, full of unspoken passion, rich in latent concentrated power. "They are very beautiful, are they not?" Leam asked suddenly. "What? who?" was Edgar's answer. "The Andalusian women, and the men," returned Leam. "The men are fine-looking fellows enough," answered Edgar carelessly--"a little too brutal for my taste, but well-grown men for all that. But I have seen prettier women out of Spain than in it." "Mamma used to say they were so beautiful--the most beautiful of all the women in the world; and the best." Leam said this with a disappointed air and her old injured accent. Edgar laughed softly. "The prettiest Andalusian woman I have ever seen has an English father," he answered, with a sudden flush on his handsome face as he bent it a little nearer to hers. "How odd!" said Leam. "An English father? That is like me." Edgar looked at her, to read how much of this was real ingenuousness, how much affected simplicity. He saw only a candid inquiring face with a faint shade of surprise in its quiet earnestness, unquestionably not affected. "Just so," he answered. "Exactly like you."