Meanwhile, the handsome officer walked over the sunny lawn with his military step, well set up, lordly, smiling.  He liked to see this bashfulness in Leam.  It was the sign of submission in one so unsubdued that flattered his pride as men like it to be flattered.  Now indeed he was the man and the superior, and this trembling little girl, blushing and downcast, was no longer his virgin nymph, self-contained and unconfessed, but the slave of his love, like so many others before her.

The child ran up to him joyfully.  She and Edgar were “great friends,” as he used to say.  He lifted her in his arms, placed her on his shoulder like a big blue forget-me-not gathered from the grass, then deposited her by Leam on the seat beneath the cut-leaved hornbeam.  And Leam was grateful that the little one was there.  It was somehow a protection against herself.

“I came to take you to the castle,” said; Edgar, looking down on the drooping figure with a tender smile on his handsome face as he took her hand in his; and held it.  “Are you ready?”

Leam’s lips moved, but at the first inaudibly.  “No,” she then said with an effort.

“It is time,” said Edgar, still holding her hand.

“I do not think I shall go,” she faltered, not raising her eyes from the ground.

Edgar, towering above her, always smiling—­the child playing with his beard as she stood on the seat breast-high with himself—­still holding that small burning hand in his, Leam not resisting, then said in Spanish, “My soul! have pity on me.”

The old familiar words thrilled the girl like a voice from the dead.  Had anything been wanting to rivet the chains in which love had bound her, it was these words, “My soul,” spoken by her lover in her mother’s tongue.  She answered more freely, almost eagerly, in the same language, “Would you be sorry?” and Edgar, whose Castilian was by no means unlimited, replied in English “Yes” at a venture, and sat down on the seat by her.

“Fina, go and ask Jones to tell you pretty stories about the bay,” he then said to the child.

“And may I ride him?” cried Fina, sure to take the ell when given the inch.

“Ask Jones,” he answered good-naturedly “I dare say he will put you up.”

Whereupon Fina ran off to the groom, whom she teased for the next half hour to give her a ride on the bay.

But Jones was obdurate.  The major’s horse was not only three sticks and a barrel, like some on ’em, he said, and too full of his beans for a little miss like her to mount.  The controversy, however, kept the child engaged if it made her angry; and thus Edgar was left free to break down more of that trembling defence-work within which Leam was doing her best to entrench herself.

“Do you know, Leam, you have not looked at me once since I came?” he said, after they had been sitting for some time, he talking on indifferent subjects to give her time to recover herself, and she replying in monosyllables, or perhaps not replying at all.