ousin-aunt,
"GRACE COMERFORD.

"PS.--Stella has something of your colouring."

"Here is the photograph," said Lady O'Gara, handing it to her husband.
"Stella is very pretty, is she not?"

He twisted his chair so that the light from the window might fall on
the photograph. The face was in profile. It was tilted delicately
upwards. There was a little straight nose, a round chin, a mouth
softly opened, one of those mouths which do not quite close. The large
eyes looked upward; the hair was short and curled in little rings.

He looked at it and said nothing, but his eyes were tragic in the
shadow.

"The profile is quite French," said Lady O'Gara. "I remember the young
man who I think must have been Stella's father. He was a lieutenant of
Chasseurs. He was killed in Algiers--afterwards. I saw it in a
newspaper about four years after our marriage. He was going to be
married when he came to Inch. His mother, who was as poor as a church
mouse, had written a bitter complaint to Aunt Grace that Gaston was
about to marry a poor Irish girl, a governess, whose part he had taken
when he thought her unfairly treated. I think Stella must be Gaston de
St. Maur's child."

"Odd, not leaving the child her own name," Sir Shawn said, handing back
the photograph.

"Aunt Grace would want her so entirely for her own. She always had a
fierce way of loving. If she had loved me more reasonably and less
jealously she would not have quarrelled with me as she did. She was
always rather terrible in anger."

She gathered together a bundle of letters which she had laid down on
the table.

"I must go and write to Aunt Grace," she said. "She must not wait for
a letter telling her how glad I shall be to see her back at Inch, how
glad we shall all be. She was very good to me, Shawn." She sent a
wistful look towards her husband who sat with his back to her. "If she
had been the aunt she called herself, instead of a somewhat remote
cousin, she could not have been kinder. She treated us very
generously, despite her anger at our marriage."

"You brought me too much," said Shawn O'Gara, not turning his head,
"and it has prospered. You should have brought me nothing but
yourself. You were a rich gift enough for any man."

Lady O'Gara looked well-pleased as she came and kissed the top of her
husband's head, dusted over its darkness with an effect of powder as
contrasted with the dark moustache and dark eyes.

"I am glad fo