nity, I think."

Her voice shook a little, and about her mouth there settled the
grieved, sorry look which touched the stranger at once, and coming close
to her again, he said:

"Your mother is a very beautiful woman. I think she has the loveliest
face I ever saw, with one exception," and he looked straight at the
young girl whom he had wounded, hoping this implied compliment might
atone.

But if Bessie heard or understood him she made no sign, and sat with her
hands locked tightly together and her eyes looking far away across the
sea of heads and the rapidly moving line of carriages.

This man knew her mother at her worst--not sweet, loving and kind as she
was sometimes at Stoneleigh, but as a gambler, an adventuress, a woman
of whom men jested and made sport--a woman who had probably ensured and
fleeced him, as Neil would have expressed it. Bessie knew all the
miserable catalogue of expedients resorted to by her mother to extort
money from her victims; cards, chess, bets, philopenas, loans she never
intended to pay, and which she accepted as gifts the instant the offer
was made, and when these failed, pitiful tales of scanty means and
pressing needs, an invalid husband at home, and a daughter who must be
supported.

She knew the whole, for she had seen a letter to her father written by
Lady Jane, who stated the case in plain language, and, denouncing Daisy
as a disgrace to the McPherson family, asked that Archie should exercise
his marital authority and keep his wife at home.

This letter had hurt Bessie cruelly, and when next her mother came to
Stoneleigh she had begged of her to give up the life she was leading,
and stay in her own home.

"And so all starve together," Daisy had answered her. "Do you know,
child, that you would not have enough to eat or wear, if it were not for
me? Your father has never earned a shilling in his life, and never will.
It is not in him. We are owing everybody, and somebody must work. If I
am that somebody, I choose to do it in my own way, and I am not the
highly demoralized female Lady Jane thinks me to be. Her bosom friend,
old Lady Oakley, plays at Monte Carlo, and so do many high-bred English
dames, and Americans, too, for that matter. I am no worse than scores of
women, except that I am poor and play from necessity, while they do it
for pastime. I have never been false to your father; no man has ever
insulted me that way, or ever will. If he did, I would shoot him as I
woul