His arm was still held out, always awkwardly crooked.

Leam lifted her eyes.  “No,” she said with her old calm decision, and moved away.  Four years ago she would have supplemented her refusal by the words, “You are stupid.  You tease me,” Now she contented herself with action and accent.

Alick, very sorry, moist-eyed from disappointment, but not caring to stand there and get chilled—­for our good Alick was a little afraid of cold, after the manner of mothers’ sons in general—­skated off again to keep up his circulation, his knees bent, his chin forward, his arms swinging as balance-weights to his long body, the ends of his white woolen comforter flying behind him, and his legs running anywhere, the clumsiest and most ungraceful skater on the Broad.  All the same, he never fell, and he went faster than even Edgar in his perfection of manly elegance.

Edgar had watched the whole of this little scene between Leam and Alick while seeming to be occupied only in executing his spread eagles and outside curves to perfection, and it was no secret to him what it meant.  The demon of masculine vanity, never far off where a pretty woman was concerned, entered and took possession of him.  He would succeed where Alick Corfield had failed, and Leam, who refused her old friend, should gratify her new.  He had been guiding Adelaide over the ice, but she was rather too stiff in her movements, not sufficiently pliant nor yielding to be a very pleasant skating companion.  And he had been pushing Josephine along the slide, but Joseph was too stout and short-breathed to be an ideal convoy; also he had been racing and half romping with the Fairbairn girls, who slipped and tumbled and laughed and screamed—­more hoydenish than he thought pleasing; but now he intended to reward himself with Leam, whose action he was sure would be all that was delightful, even though unaccustomed, and who would look so well on his arm.  Her slight and supple figure against his breadth and height and sense of solidity and strength, her dark hair and his beard of tawny brown, her large dark eyes and his of true Saxon blue, her southern face, oval in shape, cream-colored in tint, and his, square, open, ruddy, Scandinavian,—­yes, they would make a splendid pair by their very contrast; and Edgar, narrowing his ambition to his circumstances, was quietly resolved to win the day over Alick Corfield by inducing Leam to cross the Broad with him after she had so manifestly refused her old friend.  It was but a small object of ambition, but we must do what we can, thought Edgar; and it is the best wisdom to content ourselves with mice when we have no lions to destroy.  He did not, however, rush up to her with Alick’s tactless precipitancy.  He waited just long enough for her to desire, and not so long as to disappoint; then, speaking to Adelaide by the way, and giving her and Josephine each a helping hand, he came in a series of clean, showy curves to where Leam and her father were standing.