had taken to
wearing plaited about her head, was ruffled and disordered.

"Stella, darling child!" Lady O'Gara said, with a gasp of
consternation. She had never seen Stella before without brightness,
the brightness of a bird. Now the small ivory pale face had lost the
golden tints of its underlying brownness. The child was wan under the
disfigurement of her tears.

She got up with a groping motion as though tears obscured her sight.
She came to meet Lady O'Gara and held out her hands with a piteous
gesture of grief.

"She has gone away," she said.

Her hands were chill in Mary O'Gara's warm clasp. The woman drew the
girl to her, holding the cold hands against her breast with a soft
motherliness.

"Now, tell me what is the matter?" she said, while her voice shook in
the effort to be composed. "Where has Mrs. Wade gone to?"

"That is what I do not know, Lady O'Gara," Stella answered, with a
catch of the breath. "I came to her as I have come every day of late.
She was gone. I thought she would come back at first; but she has not
come. While I stood looking out of the gate watching for her an old
woman came by picking up sticks for her fire. She said"--something
like a spasm shook the slender body and her face quivered--"that she,
Mrs. Wade, was gone away. Do you know what she called her, Lady
O'Gara? She called her my _mother_--my _mother_."

The suffering eyes were full upon her. Lady O'Gara found nothing to
say that could serve any useful purpose.

"Yes, I know," she said aimlessly. "It was old Lizzie Brennan. She
lives at that gate-lodge a little way down the road."

"She said my _mother_."

The eyes, grey in one light, brown in another; made a piteous appeal.

"How could Mrs. Wade be my mother?" Stella asked, with a quiver of the
lip, clasping and unclasping her hands. "My mother died long ago. I
am Stella de St. Maur, although Granny will have me called by her name.
But I love Mrs. Wade; I love her. I have never loved any one in the
same way."

Lady O'Gara took the bewildered head into her arms and stroked it with
tender touches as though it was the head of a frightened bird, one of
those birds that sometimes came in at her windows, and nearly killed
themselves trying to escape before she could give them their liberty.
She sought in a frightened way for something to say to the girl and
could find nothing.

"Granny is so angry with me," Stella went on. "She has found out that
I came