"To you? _chi sa?_ I should say yes." She spoke quite quietly, as if nothing deeper than the question and answer of the moment lay under this crossing of swords. "No, not to me," he returned. "To me, then? I will tell you that when the time comes," she said. "Things are not always what they seem." "You speak in riddles to-night, fair lady," said Edgar, who honestly did not know what she meant him to infer--whether her present seeming indifference was real, or the deeper feeling which she had so often and for so long allowed him to believe. "Do I?" She looked into his face serenely, but a little irritatingly. "Then my spoken riddles match your acted ones," she said. "This is the first time that I have been accused of enigmatic action. Of all men I am the most straightforward, the least dubious." Edgar said this rather angrily. By that curious law of self-deception which makes cowards boast of their courage and hypocrites of their sincerity, he did really believe himself to be as he said, notably clear in his will and distinct in his action. "Indeed! I should scarcely endorse that," answered Adelaide. "I have so often known you enigmatic--a riddle of which, it seems to me, the key is lost, or to which indeed there is no key at all--that I have come to look on you as a puzzle never to be made out." "You mean a puzzle not known to my fair friend Adelaide, which is not quite the same thing as not known to any one," he said satirically, his ill-humor with himself and everything about him overflowing beyond his power to restrain. His knowledge that Miss Birkett was his proper choice, his mad love for Leam--love only on the right hand, fitness, society, family, every other claim on the left--his jealousy of Alick, all irritated him beyond bearing, and made him forget even his good-breeding in his irritation. "Not known to my friend Edgar himself," was Adelaide's reply, her color rising, ill-humor being contagious. "Now, Adelaide, you are getting cross," he said. "No, I am not in the least cross," she answered with her sweetest smile. "I have a clear conscience--no self-reproaches to make me vexed. It is only those who do wrong that lose their tempers. I know nothing better for good-humor than a good conscience." "What a pretty little sermon! almost as good as one of the Reverend Alexander's, whose sport, by the way, I shall go and spoil." "I never knew you cruel before," said Adelaide quietly. "Why should you destroy the poor fellow's happiness, as well as Leam's chances, for a mere passing whim? You surely are not going to repeat with the daughter the father's original mistake with the mother?" She spoke with the utmost contempt that she could manifest. At all events, if Edgar married Leam Dundas, she would have her soul clear. He should never be able to say that he had gone over the edge of the precipice unwarned. She at least would be faithful, and would show him how unworthy his choice was.