Adelaide said this quietly, in the well-bred but absolutely positive manner which she would have when they were married and she differed from him in opinion.  It was the moral arbitrariness of the superior being, which, amusing now in the maiden, might become wearisome, not to say oppressive, in the wife.

“Well, I do not know her as you do, of course, but I cannot see why you should dislike her so much,” persisted Edgar.

“Trust me, some day it will be seen why,” she answered.  “I feel confident that before long Leam will show herself in her true colors, and those will be black.  I pity the man who will ever be her husband.”

Edgar laughed somewhat forcedly, then looked at Leam walking up the road alone, and thought that her husband would not need much pity for his state.  Her beauty stood with him for moral qualities and intellectual graces.  Given such a face as hers, such a figure, and all the rest was included.  And when he thought of her eyes and the maddening way in which they looked into his; of the grave little smile, evanescent, delicate, subtle, the very aroma of a smile, so different from the coarse hilarity of your commonplace English girls; of the reticence and pride which gave such value to her smaller graces; of the enchanting look and accent which had accompanied her act of self-surrender just now—­that acceptance of his word and renunciation of her own fancy which had put him in the place and given him the honor of a conqueror,—­he accused Adelaide in his heart of prejudice and jealousy, and despised her for her littleness.  In fact, he was nearer to loving Leam Dundas because of these strictures than he would have been had the rector’s daughter praised her; and Adelaide, usually so politic, had made a horribly bad move by her unguarded confession of distrust and dislike.

The whole episode, however, had been lost in its true meaning to all save one—­that one the Mr. Gryce of Lionnet, who already knew what there was to be known of every family in the place, and who had the faculty of dovetailing parts into a whole characteristic of the born detective.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GREEN YULE.

The frost broke suddenly, and was succeeded by damp, close, unseasonable weather, continuing up to Christmas, and giving the “green yule” which the proverb says “makes a fat churchyard.”  That proverb was justified sadly enough at North Aston, for typhus set in among the low-lying cottages, and, as in olden times, when jail-fever struck the lawyer at the bar and the judge on the bench in stern protest against the foulness they fostered, so now the sins of the wealthy landlords in suffering such cottages as these in the bottom to exist reacted on their own class, and the fever entered other dwellings beside those of the peasants.