t laughed much in
the old days. Mary had adored her, with an adoration tinged with awe.
She had always felt in those days that it would be an awful thing to
offend Aunt Grace. She had offended her and it had been awful.

"I am longing to see Stella," she said.

"She is very joyous. I was becoming morose when I found her--like a
rogue elephant. I was wrong, Mary, to make such a grievance of your
marriage. You were a good child to me, and you would have pleased me
if you could. I know better now than to be angry with you for caring
more for Shawn O'Gara than for my son. You should have told me at the
time. You shouldn't have let me believe that you cared for Terence.
Was I an ogre? Perhaps I was. I must have been."

"I wanted to please you _dreadfully_ in those days. You had been
everything to me."

"You and Terence were everything to me. Still--I should not have been
so unreasonable as to expect you to marry Terence to please me when you
liked Shawn O'Gara better. I ought to have known that love does not
grow up like that. You and Terence were almost brother and sister."

"Yes," said Lady O'Gara. "We were so used to each other. I was
eighteen when I first saw Shawn and we fell in love at first sight."
She blushed, with a startling effect of youth. "Terence and I were
like brother and sister. It would not have worked. We were very fond
of each other, but no more than that. You were wrong when you thought
Terence would have cared."

She had expected some disclaimer, remembering Mrs. Comerford's bitter
anger because her son had been supplanted by his friend, even while he
was yet in the world; but no disclaimer came.

"Yes, I was wrong. I see it now. I ought to have come back long ago
and said I was wrong. I could not bring myself to do it, and--there
were other reasons. It is very good to come back and to see you so
bonny, Mary, and to feel that we may live in love and peace as long as
I am here."

She drank her tea and looked round the room, with a sigh as though her
heart rested on what she saw.

"You have made the old room very sweet, Mary," she went on, "and you
have remembered my tastes. Dear me, see those old things on the
chimney-piece! Those crockery dogs,--how fond Terence was of them when
he was a child! And that piece of agate, and the Rockingham lambs! I
had almost forgotten them."

"You, had better come over to Castle Talbot to lunch," Lady O'Gara
said. "I want you to