She was silent.  She had a consciousness of unknown dangers, sweet and perilous, closing around her—­dangers which she must avoid she scarcely knew how, only vaguely conscious as she was that they were about.  Then she said, with an effort, “I do not like myself talked of.  It does not matter what I am.”

“To me everything!” cried Edgar impulsively.

“You say what you do not mean,” returned Leam.  “I am not your sister; how, then, should it matter?”

Her grave simplicity was more seductive to him than the most coquettish wiles would have been.  She was so entirely at sea in the art of love-making that her very ignorance provoked a more explicit declaration.  “Are there only sisters in the world?” he asked passionately, yet angry with himself for skirting so near to the edge of peril.

“No:  there are mothers,” said Leam.

Edgar caught his breath, but again checked himself just in time to prevent the words “and wives,” that rose to his lips.  “And friends,” he substituted, with evident constraint and as awkwardly as before.  It was not often that a woman had been able to disconcert Edgar Harrowby so strangely as did this ignorant and innocent half-breed Spanish girl.

“And friends,” repeated Leam.  “But they are not much.”

“Alick Corfield?  He is my good friend,” she answered quietly.

“Yes, I know how much you like him.”  An understanding ear would have caught the sneering undertone in these words.

“Yes, I like him,” responded Leam with unmoved gravity.

“And you are sorry that he is ill—­very sorry, awfully sorry?”

“I am sorry.”

“Would you be as pained if I were ill? and would you come every day to the Hill to ask after me, as you go to Steel’s Corner to ask after him?”

“I would be pained if you were ill, but I would not go to the Hill every day,” said Leam.

“No?  Why this unfair preference?” he asked.

“Because I am not afraid of Mrs. Corfield,” she answered.

“And you are of my mother?”

“Yes.  She is severe.”

“It is severe in you to say so,” said Edgar gently.

“No,” said Leam with her proud air.  “It is true.”

“Then you would not like to be my mother’s daughter?” asked Edgar, both inflamed and troubled.

Leam looked him straight in the face, utterly unconscious of his secret meaning.  “No,” she answered, her head held high, her dark eyes proud and fixed, and her small mouth resolute, almost hard.  “I would like to be no one’s daughter but mamma’s.”

“I do love your fidelity,” cried Edgar with a burst of admiration.  “You are the most loyal girl I know.”

She turned pale:  her head drooped.  “Let us talk of something else,” she said in an altered voice.  “Myself is displeasing to me.”

“But if it pleases me?”

“That is impossible,” said Leam.  “How can it please you?”