But she went daily to Steel’s Corner, because she knew the Corfields and in her own way liked Alick.  Mrs. Corfield assured her there was no danger, not a particle, with her free use of disinfectants and her cunning devices of ventilation.  And Leam believed her, and acted on her belief, which gave her a false look of heroism and devotion that won the heart of poor Pepita’s “crooked stick” for ever.  She thought it so good of the girl, so brave and unselfish; and you could scarcely have expected such nice feeling from Leam, now could you? she used to ask her husband half a dozen times a day, ringing the changes on Leam’s good qualities as no one in the place had ever rung them before, and disturbing the poor doctor in his calculations on the varying strength of henbane and aconite till he wished that Leam Dundas had never been born.  Mrs. Corfield was just as wrong in ascribing heroic qualities to the girl for her daily visits to ask after Alick as she had been when she had credited her with moral faults because of her intellectual ignorance.  She was not afraid because she knew nothing about infection, and had therefore the boldness of ignorance, and she went daily to ask after Alick because she somehow slipped into the groove of doing so; and a groove was a great thing to conservative Leam.  Nevertheless, she was really concerned at the illness of her first North Astonian friend, and wished that he would soon get well.  She never thought that if he died she would be rid of the only person who knew her deadly secret.  Leam was not one who would care to buy her own safety at the price of another’s destruction; and, more than this, she was not afraid that Alick would betray her.

This, then, was the condition of things at North Aston at this moment:  the villagers dying of fever in the bottom, the families seeking safety in flight, Leam going daily to Steel’s Corner to ask after Alick and sit for precisely half an hour with Mrs. Corfield, and Edgar not so much taken up with bricks and mortar as not to understand times and habits, and therefore, through that understanding, seeing her for some part of every day.  And the more he saw of her the more he yearned to see, and the stronger grew her strange fascination over him.  To him, at least, the fever had not been an unmitigated evil; and though he was sometimes inclined to quarrel with the fact that Leam went daily to Steel’s Corner to inquire after Alick Corfield, yet, as he got the grain and Alick only the husk, he submitted to the process by which the best was winnowed to his side.  As the gain of that winnowing process became more evident he grew philosophically convinced that nothing is so charming in a woman as faithful friendship for a sick man, and that sitting daily for half an hour, always at exactly the same time, with an afflicted mother is the most delightful act of charity to be imagined.

CHAPTER XXVII.

IN THE BALANCE.