d, for a
moment the latter suspected her new acquaintance of joking. She found it
hard to believe that a girl of her own age should actually be a
governess. She had thought that all governesses were of Miss Bidwell's
age, and like her, too, in appearance.

"I wish you had been my governess, then," she said earnestly.

"It would have been rather a farce if I had been," Eleanor retorted, "for
I have an idea that you know very much more than I do; not that that
would be difficult, for I know nothing. Listen, now, and I will tell you
all about myself. I am Irish. My father died when I was four, and two
years later my mother married again."

"Oh!" said Margaret, with intense interest and sympathy in her voice;
"and then they cast you adrift to earn your own living?"

"No," said Eleanor, with some amusement in her voice, "they did nothing of
the sort. Besides, you can't very well cast a small person of six adrift,
as you call it, to earn her own living. On the contrary, my stepfather
was as kind to me as if I had been his own child, and I could not have
loved him more if he had been my own father whom I scarcely remember. We
were so happy together, we three. My stepfather just adored my mother,
she worshipped him, and they both spoiled and petted me. My stepfather
was a very rich man. He was English, I must tell you, but he had come to
Ireland on a visit, and there it was he met my mother; and to please her
when they were married he bought a lovely estate in Kerry, which was her
county, and became an Irishman, as he used to say. Until I was fifteen I
did exactly as I liked all day. I rode, of course, and hunted, and lived
an outdoor life, and though I had a governess and was supposed to do
lessons occasionally, it was only very occasionally that I showed my nose
in the schoolroom. And then, when I was fifteen, our happy life came to
an end. One morning my stepfather got a letter at breakfast to say that
the solicitor who had charge of all his money had committed suicide two
or three days before, and that it had been found that he had made away
with huge sums belonging to his clients. We were absolutely ruined.

"The news was such an awful shock to my stepfather that it brought on an
attack of the heart, to which he was subject, and he died that night; and
my mother died a few weeks later. She could not, she told me, face life
without him, and she pined away and died simply of a broken heart."

Eleanor's voice had become