stepmother, her kindness and sweetness, will in time soften your
feeling toward her."

Leam looked at her earnestly. "It is not for myself," she said: "it is
for mamma."

And she said it with such pathetic sincerity, such an accent of deep
love and self-abandonment to her cause, that the rector's wife felt
her eyes filling up involuntarily with tears. Wrong-headed, dense,
perverse as Leam was, her filial piety was at the least both touching
and sincere, she said to herself, a pang passing through her heart.
Adelaide would not speak of her if she were dead as this poor ignorant
child spoke of her mother. Yet she had been to Adelaide all that the
best and most affectionate kind of English mother can be, while Pepita
had been a savage, now cruel and now fond; one day making her teeth
meet in her child's arm, another day stifling her with caresses;
treating her by times as a woman, by times as a toy, and never
conscientious or judicious.

All the same, Leam's fidelity, if touching, was embarrassing as things
were; so was her belief in the continued existence of her mother. But
what can be done with those uncompromising reasoners who will carry
their creeds straight to their ultimates, and will not be put off with
eclectic compromises of this part known and that hidden--so much sure
and so much vague? Mrs. Birkett determined that her husband should
talk to the child and try to get a little common sense into her head,
but she doubted the success of the process, perhaps because in her
heart she doubted the skill of the operator.

By this time they reached the window, and the woman and the girl