y to be kind!" Joan was now to hear how that cry
had come to be uttered by a woman in the nethermost distress. She knew,
of course, that Stella was married at the age of seventeen and had been
divorced, but little more than that.

"There was a little girl," said Stella, "my baby. I lost her."

She spoke very simply. She had come to the end of efforts and schemes,
and was very tired. Joan's anger died away altogether in her heart.

"Oh, I am very sorry," she replied. "I didn't know that you had a little
girl."

"Yes. Look, here is her portrait." Stella Croyle drew out from her bosom
a locket which hung night and day against her heart, and showed it to
Joan across the table. "But I don't know whether she is little any more.
She is thirteen now."

Joan gazed at the painted miniature of a lovely child with the eyes and
the hair of Stella Croyle.

"And you lost her altogether?" she asked with a rising pity.

"Not at first," answered Stella. "I was allowed by the Court to have her
with me for one month in every year. And I lived the other eleven months
for the one, the wonderful one."

Stella's face softened indescribably. The memory of her child did for
her what all her passion for Harry Luttrell could not do. It restored
her youth. Her eyes grew tender, her mouth quivered, the look of
conflict vanished altogether.

"We had good times together, my baby and I. I took her to the sea. It
sounds foolish, but we were more like a couple of children together than
mother and daughter"; and Joan, looking at the delicate, porcelain-like
figure in front of her, smiled in response.

"Yes, I can understand that."

"She was with me every minute," Stella Croyle resumed. "I watched her
so, I gave her so much of me that when I had seen her off at the station
with her nurse at the end of the month, I was left behind, as weak and
limp as an invalid. I lived for her, Joan, believe that at all events in
my favour! There was no one else."

"I do believe it."

"Then one year in the winter she did not come to me."

"They kept her back!" cried Joan. "But you had the right to her."

"Yes. And I went down to Exeter to her father's house, to fetch her
away."

It was curious that Stella Croyle, who was speaking of her own
distressful life, told her story with a quiet simplicity of tone, as if
she had bent her neck in submission to the hammer strokes of her
destiny; whereas Joan, who was but listening to griefs of another, was
stirre