At last Mrs. Birkett gave up the contest.  “Well, my child,” she said, sighing, “I can only hope that the constant presence of your stepmother, her kindness and sweetness, will in time soften your feeling toward her.”

Leam looked at her earnestly.  “It is not for myself,” she said:  “it is for mamma.”

And she said it with such pathetic sincerity, such an accent of deep love and self-abandonment to her cause, that the rector’s wife felt her eyes filling up involuntarily with tears.  Wrong-headed, dense, perverse as Leam was, her filial piety was at the least both touching and sincere, she said to herself, a pang passing through her heart.  Adelaide would not speak of her if she were dead as this poor ignorant child spoke of her mother.  Yet she had been to Adelaide all that the best and most affectionate kind of English mother can be, while Pepita had been a savage, now cruel and now fond; one day making her teeth meet in her child’s arm, another day stifling her with caresses; treating her by times as a woman, by times as a toy, and never conscientious or judicious.

All the same, Leam’s fidelity, if touching, was embarrassing as things were; so was her belief in the continued existence of her mother.  But what can be done with those uncompromising reasoners who will carry their creeds straight to their ultimates, and will not be put off with eclectic compromises of this part known and that hidden—­so much sure and so much vague?  Mrs. Birkett determined that her husband should talk to the child and try to get a little common sense into her head, but she doubted the success of the process, perhaps because in her heart she doubted the skill of the operator.

By this time they reached the window, and the woman and the girl passed through into the room.

Mrs. Dundas came forward to meet her stepdaughter kindly—­not warmly, not tumultuously—­with her quiet, easy, waxen grace that never saw when things were wrong, and that always assumed the halcyon seas even in the teeth of a gale.  For her greeting she bent forward to kiss the girl’s face, saying, “My dear child, I am glad to see you,” but Leam turned away her head.

“I am not glad to see you, and I will not kiss you,” she said.

Her father frowned, his wife smiled.  “You are right, my dear:  it is a foolish habit,” she said tranquilly, “but we are such slaves to silly habits,” she added, looking at the rector and his wife in her pretty philosophizing way, while they smiled approvingly at her ready wit and serene good-temper.

“Will you say the same to me, Leam?” asked her father with an attempt at jocularity, advancing toward her.

“Yes,” said Leam gravely, drawing back a step.

“Tell me, Mrs, Birkett, what can be done with such an impracticable creature?” cried Mr. Dundas.

“She will come right:  in time, dear husband,” said the late marquise sweetly; and Mrs. Birkett echoed, looking at the girl kindly, “Oh yes, she will come right in time.”