“Yes, perhaps it is,” assented Josephine, who would have answered, “Yes, perhaps it is,” to anything else that her lover might have said.

“Where is Leam, my little Fina?  Do you know?” asked Sebastian of the child.

“In the garden.  She is coming in,” answered Fina; and at the word Leam passed before the window as Fina had done.

“Leam, my child, come in:  I want to speak to you,” said her father, with unwonted kindness; and Leam, too, as Fina had done before her, passed through the open window and came in.

The two middle-aged lovers were still sitting side by side and close together on the sofa.  Fina was on her stepfather’s knee, caressing his hand and Josephine’s, which were clasped together on her little lap, while his other arm encircled the substantial waist of his promised bride, whose disengaged hand rested on his shoulder.

“Leam,” said the father, “I have given you—­”

He stopped.  The name which he was about to utter, with all its passionate memories, was left unsaid.  He remembered in time Leam’s former renunciation of the new mamma whom he had once before proposed.

“I have asked Josephine Harrowby to be my wife,” he said after a short pause.  “She has consented, and made me very happy.  Let me hope that it will make you happy too.”

He spoke with forced calmness and something of sternness under his apparent serenity.  In heart he was troubled, remembering the past and half fearing the future.  How would she bear herself?  Would she accept his relations pleasantly, or defy and reject as before?

Leam looked at the triad gravely.  It was a family group with which she felt that she had no concern.  She was outside it—­as much alone as in a strange country.  She knew in that deepest self which does not palm and lie to us that all her efforts to put herself in harmony with her life were in vain.  Race, education and that fearful memory stood between her and her surroundings, and she never lost the perception of her loneliness save when she was with Edgar.  At this moment she looked on as at a picture of love and gladness with which she had nothing in common; nevertheless, she accepted what she saw, and if not expansive—­which was not her way—­was, as her father said afterward, “perfectly satisfactory.”  She went up to the sofa slowly and held out her hand.  “You are welcome,” she said gravely to Josephine, but the contempt which she had always had for her father, though she had tried so hard of late to wear it down, surged up afresh, and she could not turn her eyes his way.  What a despicable thing that must be, she thought—­that thing he called his heart—­to shift from one to the other so easily!  To her, the keynote of whose character was single-hearted devotion, this facile, fluid love, which could be poured out with equal warmth on every one alike, was no love at all.  It was a degraded kind of self-indulgence for which she had no respect; and though she did not feel for Josephine as she had felt for madame—­as her mother’s enemy—­she despised her father even more now than before.