“Yet you like dancing; so come and shake off your boredom with me,” said Edgar with a sudden flush.  “They are just beginning to waltz:  let me have one turn with you.”

“No.  Why do you ask me?  You do not like to dance with me,” said Leam proudly.

“No?  Who told you such nonsense—­such a falsehood as that?” hotly.

“Yourself,” she answered.

Alick shifted his place uneasily.  Something in Leam’s manner to Edgar struck him with an acute sense of distress, and seemed to tell him all that he had hitherto failed to understand.  But he felt indignant with Edgar, even though his neglect, at which Leam had been so evidently pained, might to another man have given hopes.  He would rather have known her loving, beloved, hence blessed, than wounded by this man’s coldness, by his indifference to what was to him, poor faithful and idealizing Alick, such surpassing and supreme delightfulness.

“I?” cried Edgar, willfully misunderstanding her.  “When did I tell you I did not like to dance With you?”

“This evening,” said Leam, not looking into his face.

“Oh, there is some mistake here.  Come with me now.  I will soon convince you that I do not dislike to dance with you,” cried Edgar, excited, peremptory, eager.

Her accusation had touched him.  It made him resolute to show her that he did not dislike to dance with her—­she, the most beautiful girl in the room, the best dancer—­she, Leam, that name which meant a love-poem in itself to him.

“Come,” he said again, offering his hand, not his arm.

Leam looked at him, meaning to refuse.  What did she see in his face that changed hers so wholly?  The weariness swept off like clouds from the sky; her mournful eyes brightened into joy; the pretty little smile, which Edgar knew so well, stole round her mouth, timid, fluttering, evanescent; and she laid her hand in his with an indescribable expression of relief, like one suddenly free from pain.

“I am glad you do not dislike to dance with me,” she said with a happy sigh; and the next-moment his arm was round her waist and her light form borne along into the dance.

As they went off Alick passed through the open window and stole away into the garden.  The pain lost by Leam had been found by him, and it lay heavy on his soul.

Dancing was Leam’s greatest pleasure and her best accomplishment.  She had inherited the national passion as well as the grace bequeathed by her mother; and even Adelaide was forced to acknowledge that no one in or about North Aston came near to her in this.  Edgar, too, danced in the best style of the best kind of English gentleman; and it was really something for the rest to look at when these two “took the floor.”  But never had Leam felt during a dance as she felt now—­never had she shone to such perfection.  She was as if taken up into another world, where she was some one else and not herself—­some one radiant, without care,