Madame was sorry, she said with her sweetest air of patience and liberal comprehension.  She would have liked the dear girl to have been her bridesmaid:  it would have been appropriate and touching.  But as she declined—­and her feelings were easy to be understood and honorable, if a little extreme—­she, madame, elected to be married as a widow should, with only Mrs. Birkett and Mr. Fairbairn as the witnesses, Mr. Fairbairn to give her away for form’s sake.  The dear rector of course would marry them in this simple manner.  They must hope that time and her own unvarying affection—­Mr. Dundas called it sweetness, angelic patience, greatness of soul—­would soften poor Leam into loving acceptance of what would be so much to her good when she could be got to understand it.  Meanwhile they must be patient—­content to go gradually and gain her bit by bit.  She, madame, would be quite content with her presence in the room, when they returned to breakfast, in the pretty white muslin frock ordered from town as the sign of her participation in the event.

But when the morning came, where was Leam?  The most diligent search failed to discover her, and the only person who could have betrayed her whereabouts was the last whom they would have thought of asking.

Of course, Mr. Dundas was properly distressed at this strange disappearance, and madame was unduly afflicted.  She proposed that the marriage should be delayed till the girl was found, but the lover was stronger than the father, and she was overruled—­yielding because it is the duty of the wife to yield, but only because of that duty—­for her own part desirous of delay until they were assured of the safety of Leam.

The ceremony, however, was performed within the canonical hours, the rector a little tremulous and apparently suffering from sore throat; and as the happy pair drove away, madame, remembering her advent and her objects more than a year ago now, could not but confess that she had done better than she expected, and, her conscience whispered, better than she deserved.

All this time Leam was sitting on the lower branches of the yew tree beneath which that godless ruffian had murdered his poor sweetheart two generations ago in Steel’s Wood.  It was a lonely corner, where no one would have gone by choice at the best of times, but now, with its bad name and evil association, it was entirely deserted.  Leam had made it her hiding-place ever since madame had taken her in hand to teach her the correct pronunciation of Shibboleth, and she had escaped from her teaching and run away into the wood, armed banditti and wild beasts notwithstanding.  And one day, hunting in it for fungi, Alick Corfield had found her sitting there, and thenceforth they had shared the retreat between them.

No one knew that they met there, and no one suspected it—­not even Mrs. Corfield, who believed, after the manner of mothers who bring up their boys at home, that she knew the whole of her son’s life from end to end, and that he had not a thought kept back from her, nor had ever committed an action of which she was not cognizant.