Alick had installed Leam as the girl-queen of his imagination, and paid her the homage which she seemed to him to deserve more than many a real queen crowned and sceptered or princess born in the purple.  It pleased him to write bad poems to her as his Infanta, his royal rose, his pomegranate flower, his nestling eagle waiting for strength to fly upward to the sun—­all with halting feet and strained metaphor.  He drew pictures of her by the dozen, mostly symbolic and all out of drawing, but expressive of his admiration, his hope, his respect; while to Leam he was little better than a two-legged talking dog whose knowledge interested and whose goodness swayed her, but on whose neck she set her little foot and kept it there.  She always treated him with profound disdain, even when he told her curious things that were like fairy-tales, some of which she did not believe if they were too far removed from the narrow area of her personal experience.  Thus, when he assured her that certain plants fed on flies as men feed on meat, she told him with her sublime Spanish calm, “I do not believe it.”  And she said the same when he one day informed her that the planets could be weighed and their distance from the earth and the sun measured.  In the beginning she knew nothing—­neither whether the earth was round or flat, nor what was the meaning of the stars, nor the name of one wild flower excepting daisies, nor of one great man.  That fallow waste called her mind was virgin ground in truth, but Alick was patient, and labored hard at the stubborn soil; and when madame had given the credit to her own tact and those ugly little books from which she taught, it was to him really that Leam’s microscopic amount of plasticity and reception was due.

These secret meetings amused Leam, and kept her from that ceaseless inward contemplation of her mother which else was her only voluntary occupation.  They gave her a sense of power, as well as of successful rebellion to her father, that gratified her pride.  To be sure, they were not what mamma would have liked.  Alick Corfield was an Englishman, and mamma hated the English.  But then, Leam reflected, she had not known Alick:  if she had, she would have seen there was no harm in him, and that he was not teaching her things which a child of Spain ought not to know, and which Saint Jago would be angry with her for learning.  And perhaps now that mamma was up in heaven, and knew all that went on here at home, she would not mind her little Leama seeing Alick Corfield so often.  In her prayers she told her very faithfully all that she had done and felt and thought; she never deceived her a hair’s breadth; and as she had asked her permission so often and so humbly, she made sure now that it was granted.  Mamma could not refuse her when she asked her so earnestly; and she was not angry, but on the contrary glad, that her little heart had such a good dog to care for her, and that she was defying el senor papa, that false image of the false saint.