“And now I have only half a heart to offer you,” he said plaintively:  “the other half is in the grave with my beloved.  But if you care to ally yourself to one who has been the sport of sorrow as I have, if you care to make the last years of my life happy, and will be content with the ashes rather than the fires, I will do my best to make you feel that you have not sacrificed yourself in vain.  Will it be a sacrifice, Josephine?” he asked in a lower tone, and with the exquisite sweetness which love and pleading give to even a commonplace voice.

“I have loved you all my life,” said Josephine simply; and then dissolving into happy tears she hid her face in his breast and felt that heaven was sometimes very near to earth.

Sebastian passed his arms round her ample comely form and pressed her to his heart, tenderly and without affectation.  It was pleasant to him to see her devotion, to feel her love; and though he disliked tears, as a man should, still tears of joy were a tribute which he did not despise in essence if the method might have been more congenial.

“Dear Josephine!” he said.  “I always knew what a good soul you were.”

This was the way in which Sebastian Dundas wooed and won an honest-hearted English lady who loved him, and who, virtue for virtue, was infinitely his superior—­a wooing in striking contrast with the methods which he had employed to gain the person of a low-class, half-savage Spanish girl, whom he had loved for her beauty and who took him for her pleasure; also in striking contrast with those he employed to gain Madame de Montfort, a clever adventuress, who balanced him, in hand, against her bird in the bush, and decided that to make sure of the less was better than to wait for the chance of the greater.  But Josephine felt nothing humiliating in his lordliness.  She loved him, she was a woman devoid of self-esteem; hence humiliation from his hand was impossible.

Just then pretty little Fina came running to the window from the garden, where she was playing.

“Come here, poppet,” said Mr. Dundas, holding out his left hand, his right round comely Josephine.

She came through the open window and ran up to him.  “Nice papa!” she lisped, stroking his hand.

He took her on his knee, “I have I given you a new mamma, Fina,” he said, kissing her; and then he kissed Josephine for emphasis.  “Will you be good to her and love her very much?  This is your mamma.”.

“Will you love me, little Fina?” asked Josephine in a voice full of emotion, taking the child’s fair head between her hands.  “Will you like me to be your mamma?”

“Yes,” cried Fina, clapping her hands.  “I shall like a nice new mamma instead of Learn.  I hate Leam:  she is cross and has big eyes.”

“Oh, we must not hate poor Leam,” remonstrated Josephine tenderly.

“I cannot understand the child’s aversion,” said Mr. Dundas in a half-musing, half-suspicious way.  “Leam seems to be all that is good and kind to her, but nothing that she does can soften the little creature’s dislike.  It must be natural instinct,” he added in a lower voice.