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Updated: June 7, 2025
He wanted to protect Leam, yet he did not want to offend Adelaide; and though he was angry with this last, he did not wish her to see that he was. "Dear Leam! I am sure she is very sweet and nice," breathed Josephine; but little Fina, playing with Josephine's chatelaine, said in her childish treble, "No, no, she is not nice: she is cross, and never laughs, and she has big eyes.
"Ah, but you must obey me now do as I tell you in everything," he said with perfect seriousness of mien and accent. "You have given yourself to me now, and if I ask you to kiss me you must, just as readily as Fina, and let me caress and pet you as much as I like." "Must I? but I do not like it," said Leam simply. He laughed outright, and Jones not looking took her hand and carried it to his lips.
Adelaide laughed outright; Josephine was embarrassed between the weak good-nature that could not resist even a child's caressing words and her constitutional pain at giving pain; Edgar tried to smile at the little one's pertness as a thing below the value of serious notice, while feeling all that a man does feel when the woman whom he loves is in trouble and he cannot defend her; but Leam herself said to the child, gravely and without bitterness, "I am not cross, Fina, and laughing is not everything."
He looked then with even more interest on the pretty little creature in dark-blue velvet and swansdown, careless, unconscious, happy, as the child of a mystery and a tragedy in one. "Ah!" he said sympathetically. "Come to me, little one," again, coaxingly. Fina, with her finger in her mouth, went up to him half shyly, half boldly, and wholly prettily.
As for Fina, she suffered mainly from a fit of indigestion consequent on the shower of sweetmeats which fell on her from all hands as the best consolation for her willful little ducking known to sane men and women presumably acquainted with the elements of physiology.
Dundas, being of those clinging, clasping natures which must love some one, had taken poor madame's child into his affections in the wholesale manner so emphatically his own, now in these first days of his new paternity seeming to live only for the little Fina, and never happy but when he had her with him.
"Hush, Fina," said Leam in an agony: "you must not talk." "You always say that, Leam, when I want to hear about mamma," was the child's petulant reply. "Go away now, dear little Fina," said Edgar, who felt all that Leam must feel at these inopportune words, and who, moreover, weak as he was in this direction, was longing for one last caress.
But Josephine felt nothing humiliating in his lordliness. She loved him, she was a woman devoid of self-esteem; hence humiliation from his hand was impossible. Just then pretty little Fina came running to the window from the garden, where she was playing. "Come here, poppet," said Mr. Dundas, holding out his left hand, his right round comely Josephine.
There were five bridesmaids, including little Fina, whom kindly Josephine had specially desired should bear her part in the pageant which was to give her a mother and a friend. The remaining four were the two Misses Harrowby, Adelaide Birkett, as her long-time confidante, and that other step-daughter, more legitimate if less satisfactory than Fina Leam.
"And the child dislikes her so much?" was Adelaide's reply, made in the form of an interrogation and with arched eyebrows. "Fina is like the discontented little squirrel who was never happy," said Josephine, patting the plump little hand that still meandered through the depths of Edgar's beard.
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