Adelaide Birkett.  She would be of infinite advantage to Learn when his wife, and when he had persuaded that sweet doubter to believe in her and accept her as she was, and as he wished her to be accepted.  As it was in the calendar of his wishes at this moment that Adelaide had never loved him, never wished to marry him, he dismissed the belief which he had cherished so long as if it had never been, and decided that it had been a mistake throughout.  She was just his friend—­no more, and never had been more.  He was not singular in his determination to find events as his desires ruled them.  It is a pleasant way of shuffling off self-reproach and of excusing one’s own fickleness.

Edgar just now believed as he wished to believe, and shut out all the rest.  As he lit his last cigar, sitting on the terrace at the Hill and watching the sheet-lightning on the horizon, he thought with satisfaction on the success of his life.  Specially he congratulated himself on his final choice.  Leam would make the sweetest little wife in the world, and he loved her passionately.  But “spooning” was exhausting work:  he would cut it short and marry her as soon as he could get things together.  Then his thoughts wandered away to some other of his personal matters; and while Leam was living over the day hour by hour, word by word, he had settled the terms for Farmer Mason’s new lease, had decided to rebuild the north lodge, which was ugly and incommodious; and on this, something catching the end of that inexplicable association of ideas, he wondered how some one whom he had left in India was going on, and what had become of Violet Cray.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

IN LETTERS OF FIRE.

THE storm which had threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed.  It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent—­the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature.  Leam, however—­interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and saw what it brought—­always remembered this early day as the ideal of peace and softness, where was no prophecy of coming evil, no shadow of the avenging hand stretched out to punish and destroy—­only peace and softness, love, joy and rest.

The gray background of the heavy sky, which to others was heavy and gloomy, was to her the loveliest expression of repose, and the absence of sunlight was as grateful as a veil drawn against the glare.  If not beautiful in itself, it added beauty to other things:  witness the passionate splendor given by it to the flowers, which seemed by contrast to gain a force and vitality of color, a richness and significance, they never had before.  She specially remembered in days to come a bed of scarlet poppies that glowed like so many cups of flame against the dark masses of evergreens behind them; and the scarlet geraniums, the bold bosses