“If you mean by coming right, letting you be my mamma, I never will,” cried Leam, fronting her stepmother.

“Silence, Leam!” cried Mr. Dundas angrily.

His wife laid her taper fingers tenderly on his.  “No, no, dear husband:  let her speak,” she pleaded, her voice and manner admirably effective.  “It is far better for her to say what she feels than to brood over it in silence.  I can wait till she comes to me of her own accord and says, ‘Mamma, I love you:  forgive me the past’”

“You are an angel,” said Mr. Dundas, pressing her hand to his lips, his eyes moist and tender.

“I always said it,” the rector added huskily—­“the most noble-natured woman of my acquaintance.”

“I never will come to you and say, ‘Mamma, I love you,’ and ask you to forgive me for being true to my own mamma,” said Learn.  “I am mamma’s daughter, no other person’s.”

Mrs. Dundas smiled.  “You will be; mine, sweet child,” she said.

How ugly Leam’s persistent hate looked by the side of so much unwearied goodness!  Even Mrs. Birkett, who pitied the poor child, thought her tenacity too morbid, too dreadful; and the rector honestly held her as one possessed, and regretted in his own mind that the Church had no formula for efficient exorcism.  Believing, as he did, in the actuality of Satan, the theory of demoniacal possession came easy as the explanation of abnormal qualities.

Her father raged against himself in that he had given life to so much moral deformity.  And yet it was not from him that she inherited “that cursed Spanish blood,” he said, turning away with a groan, including Pepita, Leam, all his past with its ruined love and futile dreams, its hope and its despair, in that one bitter word.

“Don’t say that, papa:  mamma and I are true.  It is you English that are bad and false,” said Leam at bay.

Mrs. Dundas raised her hand, “Hush, hush, my child!” she said in a tone of gentle authority.  “Say of me and to me what you like, but respect your father.”

“Oh, Leam has never done that,” cried Mr. Dundas with intense bitterness.

“No,” said Leam, “I never have.  You made mamma unhappy when she was alive:  you are making her unhappy now.  I love mamma:  how can I love you?”

And then, her words realizing her thoughts in that she seemed to see her mother visibly before her, sorrowful and weeping while all this gladness was about in the place which had once been hers, and whence she was now thrust aside—­these flowers of welcome, these smiling faces, this general content, she alone unhappy, she who had once been queen and mistress of all—­the poor child’s heart broke down, and she rushed from the room, too proud to let them see her cry, but too penetrated with anguish to restrain the tears.

“I am sure I don’t know what on earth we can do with that girl,” said Mr. Dundas with a dash of his old weak petulance, angry with circumstance and unable to dominate it—­the weak petulance which had made Pepita despise him so heartily, and had winged so many of her shafts.