Was it craft? was it indifference? or was it honest ignorance of the true motive of a man’s words and looks?  Edgar pondered for a moment, but could come to no definite conclusion save rejection of that one hypothesis of craft.  Leam was too savagely direct, too uncompromising, to be artful.  No man who understood women only half so well as Edgar Harrowby understood them could have credited such a character as hers with deception.

He wavered, then, between the alternative of indifference or ignorance.  If the one, he felt bound by self-respect to overcome it—­that self-respect which a man of his temperament puts into his successes with women; if the other, he must enlighten it.  “Does it not please you to talk of those you like?” he asked after a short pause.

“Yes,” said Leam, her face suddenly softening into tenderness as she thought of her mother; of whom Edgar did not think.  “Talk to me of Spain and all that you did there.”

“And that would be of what you like?” he asked.

“Of what I love,” returned Leam in a low voice, her eyes lifted to his, soft and humid.

“How can I read you?  What can I think?  What do you want me to believe?” cried Edgar in strange trouble.

“What have I said?” she asked with grave surprise.  “Why do you speak like this?”

“Are you playing with me, or do you want me to understand that you have made me happy?” he cried, his face, voice, bearing, all changed, all full of an unknown something that half allured and half frightened her.

She turned aside her head with her cold, proud, shrinking air.  “I am not playing with you; and you are silly to say I have made you happy,” she said, shaking her reins lightly and quickening her chestnut’s uneasy pace; and Edgar, quickening the pace of his heavy bay, thought it wiser to let the moment pass, and so stand free and still wavering—­in doubt and committed to nothing.

Thus the time wore on, with frequent meetings, always crowded with doubts and fears, hopes, joys, displeasures in a tangled heap together, till the drying winds of March set in and cleared off the last of the fever, which had by now worn itself away, and by degrees the things of North Aston went back to their normal condition.  The families came into residence again, and save for the widow’s wail and the orphan’s cry in the desolated village below, life passed as it had always passed, and the strong did not spend their strength in bearing the burdens of the weak.

The greatest social event that had taken place in consequence of the epidemic was, that Mr. Dundas had made acquaintance with his new tenant at Lionnet.  Full of painful memories for him as the place was, he could not let the poor fellow die, he said, with no Christian soul near him.  As a landlord he felt that he owed this mark of humanity to one of whom, if nothing absolutely good was known, neither was there anything absolutely bad, save that negative misdemeanor of not coming to church.  As this was not an unpardonable offence to a man who had traveled much if he had thought little, Mr. Dundas let his humanity get the upper hand without much difficulty.  By which it came about that he and his new tenant became friends, as the phrase goes, and that thus another paragraph was added to the restricted page of life as North Aston knew it.