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Updated: July 7, 2025
"How wise and good you are!" he said with almost enthusiasm; and Josephine, her eyes humid with glad tears, her cheeks flushed with palpitating joy, sank in soul to him again, as so often before, and offered the petition of her humble love, which wanted only his royal signature to make an eternal bond. "I love little Fina," she said tremulously. It was as if she had said, "I love you."
"And she died?" continued Fina, yawning in a childishly indifferent manner. "Yes, she died." "Why? Who killed her? Did papa?" asked Fina. Leam's face was very white: "No, not papa." "Did God?" "I cannot tell you, Fina," said Leam, to whom falsehoods were abhorrent and the truth impossible. "Did you?" persisted Fina with childish obstinacy.
She preferred that he should be wholly unconnected with her just her friend unrelated: that was all. "Thank you, dear Leam!" said Josephine gratefully; and Leam, looking at her with large mournful eyes, said in a soft but surprised tone of voice, "Thank me! why?" "That you accept me as your stepmother so sweetly, and do not hate me for it," said Josephine. Leam glanced with a pained look at Fina.
She was an odd girl, you know, they whispered from each to each moody, uncomfortable, and unlike any one else; and though she had certainly behaved admirably to little Fina, so far as they could see, yet it was not quite out of the nature of things that she should wish to get rid of the child, who, after all, was the child of no one knows whom, and very likely spoilt and tiresome enough.
"Yes, perhaps it is," assented Josephine, who would have answered, "Yes, perhaps it is," to anything else that her lover might have said. "Where is Leam, my little Fina? Do you know?" asked Sebastian of the child. "In the garden. She is coming in," answered Fina; and at the word Leam passed before the window as Fina had done.
And for himself, would she make him happy? On the whole he thought that she would. She worshiped him, perhaps, as he had worshiped that other, and it was pleasant to Sebastian Dundas to be worshiped. He might do worse, if also he might do better; but at least in taking Josephine he knew what he was about, and Fina would not be made unhappy. He forgot Leam.
"That is not a very polite way of putting it," said Edgar a little gravely. "No," said Josephine. "You should speak nicely of your sister, my little one," put in Sebastian. Fina looked up into his face reproachfully. "You called it a noise yourself, papa," she said, pouting.
"But you did say it was a noise," persisted Fina, climbing on to his knees and putting her arms round his neck. "And I think it a noise too." "Poor Leam's music cannot be very first-rate," remarked Maria, who was a proficient and played almost as well as a "professional." "Four years ago she did not know her notes, and four years' practice cannot be expected to make a perfect pianiste."
The things of the rectory were much in their old state. Little Fina, madame's child, was there under Mrs. Birkett's motherly care; but as the child was nearly six years old now, the good creature's instinctive love for infants was wearing out, and she was often heard to say how much she wished she could have kept Fina always a baby, and, sighing, how difficult she was to manage!
Birkett dissented from these views, and said it would keep the house together and be such a nice thing for Fina and Leam: both would be the better for a woman's influence and superintendence, and Josephine was very good. "Yes," said the rector with his martial air "good enough, I admit, but confoundedly slow." To Edgar, Adelaide expressed herself with delightful enthusiasm.
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