Leam, who had not been in bed through the night, was sitting on the sofa in the remotest and darkest part of the room.  She rose as he entered—­rose only, not coming forward to meet him, but standing in her place silent, pale, yet calm and collected.  She did not look at him, but neither did she blush nor tremble.  There was something statuesque, almost dead, about her—­something that was not the same Leam whom he had known from the first.

He went up to her, both hands held out.  She shrank back and folded hers in each other, still not looking at him.

“Why, Leam, what is it?” he cried in amazement, pained, shocked at her action.  Was she in her right mind?  Had she heard of his former attentions to Adelaide, divined their ultimate meaning, and been seized with a mad idea of sacrifice and generosity?  It must be with Adelaide, he thought, rapidly reviewing his past.  He was absolutely safe about Violet Cray, who had never known his name; and those later Indian affairs were dead and as good as buried.  What, then, did it mean?

“No, not till you have heard me,” said Leam in a low voice.  “And never after.”

“My darling! what is it?” he repeated.

“You must not call me dear names:  I am unworthy,” said Leam.  “No,” checking him as he would have spoken, smiling with a sense of relief that her craze—­if it was a craze—­went to the visionary side of her own unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as she might think them.  “Do not speak.  I have to tell you.  I had forgotten it,” she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner—­the manner of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion—­“I was so happy in these last days I had forgotten it.  Now I have remembered, and we must part.”

Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if grieved not afraid.  Leam’s little life, so innocent and uneventful as it must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to hint.  Grant even that there had been something more between her and Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear—­which was his first thought—­still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very simple.  His wife must be spotless—­that he knew, and he would marry none whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must be her future—­absolute purity—­the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions.  He owed it to himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was, should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that he ought to take to