“Thank you?  For what?” asked Leam.  “You made mamma miserable when she lived:  you and your madame helped to kill her, and now you put this woman in her place!  Papa, I wonder Saint Jago lets you live.”

“As Saint Jago is kind enough to leave me in peace, perhaps you will follow his example.  What a saint allows my little daughter may accept,” said Mr. Dundas mockingly.

“No,” said Leam with pathetic solemnity, “if the saints forget mamma, I will not.”

“My dear, you are a fool,” said Mr. Dundas.

“You may call me what you like, but madame shall not be my mother,” returned Leam.

“Madame will be your mother because she will be my wife,” said Mr. Dundas slowly.  “Unfortunately for you—­perhaps for myself also—­neither you nor I can alter the law of the land.  The child must accept the consequences of the father’s act.”

“Then I will kill her,” cried Leam.

Her father laughed gayly.  “I think we will brave this desperate danger,” he said.  “It is a fearful threat, I grant—­an awful peril—­but we must brave it, for all that.”

“Papa,” said Leam, “I will pray to the saints that when you die you may not go to heaven with mamma and me.”

It was her last bolt, her supreme effort at threat and entreaty, and it meant everything.  If her words of themselves would have amused Mr. Dundas as a child’s ignorant impertinence, the superstition of an untaught, untutored mind, her looks and manner affected him painfully.  True, he did not love her—­on the contrary, he disliked her—­but, all the same, she was his child; and, dissected, realized, it was rather an awful thing that she had said.  It showed an amount of hatred and contempt which went far beyond his dislike for her, and made him shudder at the strength of feeling, the tenacity of hate, in one so young.

If more absurdity than good sense is talked about natural affection, still there is a residuum of fact underneath the folly; and Leam’s words had struck down to that small residuum in her father’s heart.  It was not that he was wounded sentimentally so much as in his sense of proprietorship, his paternal superiority, and he was angry rather than sorrowful.  It made him feel that he had borne with her waywardness long enough now:  it was time to put a stop to it.  “Now, Leam, no more insolence and no more nonsense,” he said sternly.  “You have tried my patience long enough.  This day month I marry Madame de Montfort, with or without your pleasure, my little girl.  In a month after that I bring her home here as my wife, consequently your mother, the mistress of the house and of you.  I give you the best guide, the best friend, you have ever had or could have:  you will live to value her as she deserves.  Your own mother was not fit to guide you:  your new one will make you all that my dearest hopes would have you.  Now go.  Think over what I have said.  If you do not like our arrangements, so much the worse for you.”