A scared look passed over Leam’s face.  It was a look that meant a cry.  She pressed her hands together and involuntarily drew back a step, cowering.  She felt as if some strong hand had struck her a heavy blow, and that it had made her reel.  “You are cruel to say that.  Why should I marry—?” She began in a defiant tone, and then she stopped.  Was she not betraying herself for the very fear of discovery?

“Alick Corfield, for instance?” put in Mr. Gryce, at a venture.  “He may serve for an illustration as well as any one else,” he added with a soothing kind of indifference, troubled by the intense terror that came for one moment into her face.  How soon he had startled her from her poor little hiding-place!  How easy the assumption of extraordinary, powers based on the clever use of ordinary faculties!  Your true magician is, after all, only your quiet and accurate observer.  “You are not vexed that I speak of him when I want a name?” he asked, after a pause to give Leam time to regain her self-possession, to readjust the screen, to fasten once more the mask.

“Why should I be vexed?” she said in a low voice.

“He is not disagreeable to you?”

“No, he is my friend,” she answered.

“And a good fellow,” said Mr. Gryce, lisping over a maple twig.  “Don’t you think so?”

“He is good,” responded Leam like a dry and lifeless echo.

“An admirable son.”

“Yes.”

“A devoted friend—­a friend to be trusted to the death; a man without his price, incorruptible, with whom a secret, say, would be as safe as if buried in the grave.  He would not give it even to the wind, and no reed on his land would whisper ‘Midas has ass’s ears.’”

“He is good,” she repeated with a shiver.  Yet the sun was shining and the spring-tide air was sweet and warm.

“And he would make the most faithful and indulgent husband.”

There was no answer.

“Do you not agree with me?”

“How should I know?” she answered; and she said no more, though she still shivered.

“Be sure of it—­take my word for it,” he said again, earnestly.

“It is nothing to me.  And I hate your word indulgent!” cried Leam with a flash of her mother’s fierceness.

Mr. Gryce, still watching her, smiled softly to himself.  His love of knowledge, as he euphemistically termed his curiosity, was roused to the utmost, and he was like a hunter who has struck an obscure trail.  He wished to follow this thing to the end, and to know in what relations she and her old friend stood together—­if Alick knew what he, Mr. Gryce, knew now, and had offered to marry her notwithstanding; and whether, if he had offered, Leam had refused or accepted.  Observation and induction were hurrying him very near the point.  Her changing color, her averted eyes, her effort to maintain the pride and coldness which were as a rule maintained without effort, the spasm of terror that had crossed her face when he had spoken of Alick’s fidelity, all confirmed him in his belief that he was on the right track, and that the lines in her hand coincided with the facts of her tragic life.  Tragic indeed—­one of those lives fated from the beginning, doomed to sorrow and to crime like the Orestes, the Oedipus, of old.