And Josephine said gallantly, “Yes,” but her heart was more rueful than her voice, and she thought that some gentlemen were very nice, and that Sebastian Dundas especially made the dull time pass pleasantly.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CHILD FINA.

Nothing surprised the North Astonians more than what it was the fashion to call “the admirable manner in which Leam behaved to the child Fina.”  If the world which praised her had known all the compelling circumstances, would it have called her admirable then?  Yet beyond those natural promptings of remorse which forced her to do the best she could for the child whom her fatal crime had rendered motherless, Leam did honestly behave well, if this means doing irksome things without complaint and sacrificing self to a sense of right.  And this was all the more praiseworthy in that sympathy of nature between these two young creatures there was none, and the girl’s maternal instinct was not of that universal kind which makes all children pleasant, whatever they may be.  Hence, she did nobly when she did her duty with the uncompromising exactness characteristic of her; but then it was only duty, it was not love.

How should it be love?  Her tenacity and reserve were ill matched with Fina’s native inconstancy of purpose and childish incontinence of speech; her pride of race resented her father’s adoption of a stranger into the penetralia of the family; and to share the name she had inherited from her mother with the daughter of that mother’s rival seemed to her a wrong done to both the living and the dead.  Naturally taciturn, unjoyful, and ever oppressed by that brooding consciousness of guilt hanging like a cloud over her memory, formless, vague, but never lifting, Fina’s changeful temper and tumultuous vivacity were intensely wearisome to her.  Nevertheless, she was forbearing if not loving, and the people said rightly when they said she was admirable.

Her grave patience with the little one did more to open her father’s heart to her than did even her own wonderful beauty, which gratified his paternal pride of authorship, or than her efforts after docility to himself—­efforts that would have been creditable to any one, and that with her were heroic.  For Mr. Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame’s child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him.  It was the first time that he felt he had had a child of his own; and he gave her the love which would have been Leam’s had Pepita been less of a savage than she was, and more discreet in the matter of doll-dressing.