her anger was that while she said appalling things her
voice had hardly lifted.

Stella looked at her in a bewildered way. "I do not understand," she
said. "You always told me my father was a gentleman. You said little
about my mother. 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."

"Then I am your granddaughter?"

"In nature, not in law. My son did not marry your mother."

Stella groped in the air with her hands. They were taken and pressed
against Mary O'Gara's heart. Mary O'Gara's arms drew the stricken
child close to her.

"Go," she said to the pale, evil-looking woman, in whom she hardly
recognized Mrs. Comerford--"Go!--and ask God to forgive you and deliver
you from your wicked temper. It has blighted your own life as well as
your son's and your granddaughter's. Go!"

Mrs. Comerford put her hand to her throat. Her face darkened. She
seemed as if she were going to fall. Then she controlled herself as by
a mighty effort, turned and went out of the house. The bang of the
hall-door as she went shook the little house. A second or two later
her carriage passed the window, she sitting upright in it, her curious
stateliness of demeanour unaltered.

Mary O'Gara did not look through the window to see her go. Her eyes
were blind with tears as she bent over the child who was the innocent
victim of others.

All her life afterwards she could never forget the anguish of poor
Stella, who was like a thing demented. She could remember the objects
that met her eyes as she held the two hot trembling hands to her with
one hand while the other stroked Stella's ruffled hair. She felt as
though she were holding the girl back by main force from the borderland
beyond which lay total darkness. She could remember afterwards just
the look of things--the Autumn leaves and berries in the blue jars on
the chimney-piece; the convex glass leaning forward with its outspread
eagle, mirroring her and Stella; Shot lying on his side on the
hearthrug, now and again heaving a deep sigh. How pretty the room was,
she kept thinking! What a quiet background for this human tra