Leam put the question by.  “Yes, you have always been kind to me,” she answered.  “I remember when mamma died how you wanted to be kind then.  But I did not understand you as I do now.  And how good Alick was!  How sorry I should have been if anything had happened to him now!” Her beautiful face grew tender with the thought.  She did really love Alick in her girlish, sisterly way.

Mrs. Corfield looked at her.  “Have you never loved any one else as you loved your poor mother?” she asked.

Leam lifted her eyes.  “Never,” she answered simply.  “I have liked a few people since, but love as I loved mamma?  No!”

“Leam, I am going to ask you a straightforward question, and you must give me a straightforward answer:  Which do you like best, my boy or Edgar Harrowby?” Mrs. Corfield asked this suddenly, as if she wanted to surprise the girl’s secret thought rather than have a deliberate answer.

“I like them differently,” began Leam without affectation.  “Alick is so unlike Major Harrowby in every way.  And then I have known him so long—­since I was a mere child.  I feel that I can say what I like to him:  I always did.  But Major Harrowby is a stranger, and I am—­I don’t know:  it is all different.  I cannot say what I mean.”  She hesitated, stopped, grew pale, glanced aside and looked disturbed; then putting on her old air of cold pride, she drew herself a few paces away and said, “Why do you ask me such a question, Mrs. Corfield?  You should not.”

Mrs. Corfield sighed.  If Edgar was undecided between his personal desires and conventional fitness, she was undecided between her longing to see Alick happy and her dislike to his being happy in any way but the one she should design for him.  He had raved a good deal during his illness, and had said many mad things connected with Leam—­always Leam; and since his convalescence his mother had seen clearly enough how his heart was toward her.  His pleasure when he heard that she had been there, his childish delight in anything that she had brought for him, the feverishness with which he waited to hear her step, her voice from a distance, always demanding that the doors should be left open so that he might hear her,—­all betrayed to his mother as plainly as confession would have done the real thoughts of his heart, and cast a trouble into her own whence she saw no present satisfactory issue.  Though she was fond of Leam now, and grateful to her for her faithful visits during Alick’s illness, yet, just as Edgar doubted of her fitness as a wife for the master of the Hill, so did she doubt of her fitness as a daughter-in-law for Steel’s Corner.  As a friend she was pleasant enough, with her quaint ways and pretty face; but as one of the Corfield family, bound to them for ever—­what then would she be?  But again, if Alick really loved her, she would not like to see him disappointed.  So, what between her dislike to the marriage should it ever be, and her fear for Alick’s unhappiness