d to a compassion which kindled her face and made her voice shake.

"Oh, they hadn't sent her away! She was waiting for you," she cried
eagerly.

"She was waiting for me. Yes! But it was no longer my baby who was
waiting. They had worked on her, Robert, my husband--and his sisters.
They had told her--oh, more than they need! That I was bad."

"Oh!" breathed Joan.

"Yes, they were a little cruel. They had changed baby altogether. She
was just eight at that time." Stella stopped for a moment or two. Her
voice did not falter but her eyes suddenly swam with tears. "She used to
adore me--she really and truly did. Now her little face and her eyes
were like flint. And what do you think she said to me? Just this!
'Mummy, I don't want to go with you. If you take me with you, you'll
spoil my holidays!'"

Joan shot back in her chair.

"But they had taught her to say that?"

Stella Croyle shook her head.

"They had taught her to dislike me. My little girl has character. She
wouldn't have repeated the words, because she had been taught them. No,
she meant them."

"But a day or two with you and she would have forgotten them. Oh, she
_did_ forget them!"

In her great longing to comfort the woman, whose deep anguish she
divined beneath the quiet desolation of her voice, Joan overleapt her
own knowledge. She was still young enough to will that past events had
not occurred, and that things true were false.

"I didn't take her," replied Stella Croyle. "I wouldn't take her. I knew
baby--besides she had struck me too hard."

"You came away alone!" whispered Joan.

"In the cab which I had kept waiting at the door to take us both away."

"That's terrible!" said Joan. The child with her lovely face set like
flint in the room, the mother creeping out of the house and stumbling
alone into the fly at the door--the picture was vivid before her eyes.
Joan wrung her hands with a little helpless gesture, and a moan upon her
lips. Almost it seemed that these sad things were actually happening to
_her_; so poignantly she felt them.

"Oh, and you had all that long journey back to London, the journey you
had dreamt of for eleven months with your baby at your side--you had now
to take it alone."

Stella Croyle shook her head.

"No! There was just one and only one of my friends--and not at all a
great friend--who had the imagination to understand, as you understand
too, Joan, just what that journey would have meant to me, if anything