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What have you against my mother except that she was a poor governess?" "All that was fiction," said Grace Comerford, with a terrible laugh. "Very poor fiction. I often wondered that any one believed it. Your father was my son, Terence Comerford. He disgraced himself." She was as white as a sheet by this time. "Your mother was the granddaughter of the woman who kept the public-house in Killesky."
Why, any one might have known that Stella was a Comerford by that colour; not the child of some dark Frenchman. "You stand up to me better than your father ever did," said Mrs. Comerford in white and gasping fury. Had she no pity, Mary O'Gara asked herself; and remembered that Grace Comerford's anger was sheer madness while it lasted. She had always known it.
Don't you see now how impossible it is? I wish to Heaven Grace Comerford had not come back." A sense of the piteousness, the pitilessness, of it all came overwhelmingly to Mary O'Gara. She had been learning to love Stella. The fond, ardent little creature had pushed herself into her heart. What was to happen to them all, to Terry, to Stella, to herself?
"You should not have thought it; you were his mother," Mrs. Wade, or Mrs. Comerford, said simply. Then she settled down as to a story-telling. "My grandmother kept her word to you, Mrs. Comerford," she said. "You told her I was not to come back. She did not live very long after we left Killesky. We had reached Liverpool on our way to America, and she became ill there.
He absolved me from that oath. He said it wasn't binding, and that I was in the wrong to let people think me something I was not, much less the wrong to the child deprived of her father as well as her mother." "He was quite right there," Mrs. Comerford said. "I never had Stella's heart. She wanted you if she could not have her father." "I had too low an opinion of myself.
Apparently she expected contradiction, but she met with none. Lady O'Gara was in fact too dumbfounded to answer. "Many's the time I took notice of Bridyeen," the old woman went on. "She was well brought up. She respected ould people. When she wint away out of the place I said nothin', whatever I guessed. I said nothin' all those years. It was to me she kem when Mr. Terence Comerford was kilt.
Wade and how she pitied her, she knew not for what. She threw out her hands in a gesture of despair. "It seems we are all going to be hurt," she said. "I would not mind if it were not for the children. Why did Grace Comerford bring Stella where she and Terry were certain to meet? The boy was bound to find her irresistible?"
Perhaps she ought to be too careful of Stella to bring her into touch with a woman who had slipped from virtue, however innocently and pitiably. It was a scruple which might not have troubled her if Stella had been her own child. There was another thing. Would Grace Comerford, if she knew all, be willing that her adopted daughter should be friends with Mrs. Wade?
A pale shaft of Winter sunshine stole through the low hall window, filtered through red dead leaves that gave it the colour of a dying sunset. It fell on Stella's hair, bringing out its bronzes. She had the warm bronze hair of her father's people. It came to Lady O'Gara suddenly that she and Stella had much the same colouring. In Terence Comerford it had been ruddier.
Comerford superbly. "She has never travelled. We shall probably do some travelling together. You had better resign your commission." "Oh, must I? I might get a year's leave because of my ... Stella's health. I am very fond of the Regiment. But of course I should not put it before her." "Of course not. I don't mind your sticking to the Regiment, as you say, for a bit longer.
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