The little round, fair-haired creature, with her picturesque Gainsborough head and rose-red lips, pretty, pleasant, facile, easily amused if easily made cross, divertible from her purpose if she was but coaxed and caressed, and if the substitute offered was to her liking—­without tenacity, fluid, floating on the surface of things and born of their froth; loving only those who ministered to her pleasure and were in sight; forgetting yesterday’s joys as though they had never been, and her dearest the moment they were absent—­a child deliciously caressing because sensual by temperament and instinctively diplomatic, with no latent greatness to be developed as time went on and the flower set into the fruit.  Epitomizing the characteristics of the class of which her mother had been a typical example, she was the pleasantest thing of his life to a man who cared mainly to be amused, and who liked with a woman’s liking to be loved.

The strong love of children inherent in him, which had never been satisfied till now, seemed now to have gathered tenfold strength, and the love of the man, who had never cared for his own, for this his little daughter by adoption was almost a passion.  If Leam could have been jealous where she did not love, she would have been jealous of her father and Fina.  But she was not.  On the contrary, it seemed to soften some of the bitterness of her self-reproach, and she was glad that madame’s motherless child was not deserted, but had found a substitute for the protection which she had taken from her; for Leam, criminal, was not ignoble.

A few days after the meeting on the moor between Learn and Edgar, Mr. Dundas drove to the Hill, carrying Fina with him.  Leam had a fit of shyness and refused to go:  thus Sebastian had the child to himself, and was not sorry to be without his elder and less congenial daughter.  He owned to himself that she was good, very good indeed, and a great deal better than he ever expected she would be; yet for all that, with her more than Oriental gravity and reserve, and that look of tragedy haunting her face, she was not an amusing companion, and the little one was.

Mr. Dundas had begun to take up his old habits again with the Harrowbys.  He found the patient constancy of his friend Josephine not a disagreeable salve for a wounded heart and broken life; albeit poor dear Joseph was getting stout and matronly, and took off the keen edge of courtship by a willingness too manifest for wisdom.  Sebastian liked to be loved, but he did not like to be bored by being made overmuch love to.  The things are different, and most men resent the latter, how much soever they desire the former.

Edgar was in the drawing-room when Mr. Dundas was announced.  He was booted and spurred, waiting his horse to be brought round.  “What a pretty little girl!” he said after a time.  True to his type, he was fond of children and animals, and children and animals liked him.  “Come and speak to me,” he continued, holding out his hand to Fina.—­“Whose child is she?” vaguely to the company in general.