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Updated: June 1, 2025
Nothing roused in her so much the old Leam of pride and disdain as these encounters with Adelaide Birkett. The two were like the hereditary foes of old-time romance, consecrated to hate from their birth upward. "Come, come, fair lady, you are rather hard on our young friend," said Edgar with a strange expression in his eyes angry, intense, and yet uncertain.
Punctually at seven Adelaide Birkett appeared. This, too, was one of her minor virtues: she was exact. Mind, person, habits, all were regulated with the nicest method, and she knew as little of hurry as of delay, and as little of both as of passion.
It looked like it, they said, in whispers, for it was to be supposed that Major Harrowby was an honorable man and a gentleman, and would not play with a child like Leam. Dear Mrs. Birkett was manifestly distressed at what she saw.
Birkett echoed, looking at the girl kindly, "Oh yes, she will come right in time." "If you mean by coming right, letting you be my mamma, I never will," cried Leam, fronting her stepmother. "Silence, Leam!" cried Mr. Dundas angrily. His wife laid her taper fingers tenderly on his. "No, no, dear husband: let her speak," she pleaded, her voice and manner admirably effective.
Birkett gave him his title as his curate. It could hardly be said that the relations were entirely harmonious between the military-minded rector, who held to the righteousness of helotry and the value of ignorance in the class beneath him, and the young curate burning with zeal and oppressed with the desire to put all the crooked things of life straight.
Birkett were warm partisans; and only Adelaide joined hands with the Hill and said that Mrs. Harrowby was justified in her renunciation and that madame was a wretch.
Birkett, who pitied the poor child, thought her tenacity too morbid, too dreadful; and the rector honestly held her as one possessed, and regretted in his own mind that the Church had no formula for efficient exorcism. Believing, as he did, in the actuality of Satan, the theory of demoniacal possession came easy as the explanation of abnormal qualities.
"Think not?" was Adelaide's reply; and then she whipped her ponies and said no more. "Why does Miss Birkett hate me?" asked Leam when Edgar came back. "Because Shall I tell you?" he answered with a look which she could not read. "Yes, tell me." "Because you are more beautiful than she is, and she is jealous of you.
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