“Mine,” said Mr. Dundas emphatically—­“my youngest daughter, Fina Dundas.”

Edgar knew what he meant.  He had often heard the story from his sisters, and since his return home he had had Adelaide Birkett’s comments thereon.  He looked then with even more interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one.

“Ah!” he said sympathetically.  “Come to me, little one,” again, coaxingly.

Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily.  She let him take her on his knee and kiss her without remonstrance.  She was of the kind to like being taken on knees and kissed—­especially by gentlemen who were strong and matronly women who were soft—­and she soon made friends.  Not many minutes elapsed before, kneeling upon his knees, she was stroking his tawny beard and plaiting it in threes, pulling his long moustache, playing with his watch-guard, and laughing in his face with the pretty audacity of six.

“What a dear little puss!” cried Edgar, caressing her.  “Very like you, Joseph, I should think, when you were her age, judging by your picture.  Is she not, mother?”

“They say so, but I do not see it,” answered Mrs. Harrowby primly.

She did not like to hear about this resemblance.  There was something in it that annoyed her intensely, she scarcely knew why, and the more so because it was true.

“Poor madame used to say so:  she saw it from the first, when Fina was quite a little baby,” said Josephine in a low voice.

She was kneeling by her brother’s side caressing Fina.  She always made love to the little girl:  it was one of her methods of making love to the father.

“Is she like her mother?” asked Edgar in the same low tones, looking at the child critically.

“A little,” answered Josephine—­“not much.  It is odd, is it not, that she should be more like me?”

Just then Fina laid her fresh sweet lips against Edgar’s, and he kissed her with a strange thrill of tenderness.

“Why, Edgar, I never saw you take so to a child before,” cried Mrs. Harrowby, not quite pleasantly; and on Sebastian adding with his nervous little laugh, which meant the thing it assumed only to play at, “I declare I shall be quite jealous, Edgar, if you make love to my little girl like this.”  Edgar, who had the Englishman’s dislike to observation, save when he offered himself for personal admiration, laughed too and put Fina away.

But the child had taken a fancy to him, and could scarcely be induced to leave him.  She clung to his hand still, and went reluctantly when her stepfather called her.  It was a very little matter, but men being weak in certain directions, it delighted Edgar and annoyed Sebastian beyond measure.

“I hope your elder daughter is well,” then said Edgar, emphasizing the adjective, the vision of Leam as he first saw her, breasting the wind, filling his eyes with a strange light.