. She rushed into the room where I was with Mr. Heron. He had to
seize her hands to keep her from tearing the picture in pieces; and he
held them while he told her his sad story. He'd been visiting Ireland,
it seemed, years before, and met a girl, very poor but very lovely, and
married her when they'd known each other a few weeks. It seemed the girl
had been engaged to someone else; and that someone took a cruel revenge
on Heron. By a plot which he confessed afterward when it was too late,
he made it appear that the girl had been his mistress. The evidence was
so strong Heron could hardly help believing, so he came back to America
and tried to forget. Years after the other man, dying of typhoid,
confessed to a priest that he had lied, and forged letters. The priest
wrote to Heron. But the poor, deserted girl was dead, and all that Heron
could learn when he dashed back to Ireland to find her was that a baby
girl had been born a few months after he left his wife. He tried for
years to trace the child, but could not. And it was only after he'd
given up all hope that he married Dolores Moreno. I think Mr. Heron felt
tender over us children because of his lost little one. After leaving us
in Russia at school for a while, and a year in England, to learn the
language better than we knew it, another year in France and another in
Italy (in families whom he paid to educate and take care of us) he must
have had a longing to see what we were like. He and Dolores, his wife,
came abroad, and brought us back to America with them, much against
Dolores' will, I know. I was nearly eighteen, and I realized the first
minute we met that Dolores was going to hate me. We went straight to a
house near Albuquerque, which belongs to Mrs. Heron. Her brother Louis
always lived there. He was an invalid, you know; about a year younger
than Dolores; something wrong with his heart, and almost a
hunchback--but oh, what a handsome face! When he took a violent fancy to
me her one thought was to get me out of his way. Louis had money of his
own. He was rich, and I suppose Dolores was afraid I might try to marry
him, as I hadn't a penny. It was bad enough for her that Mr. Heron
should have a tenderness for me, because of his lost child; but that
Louis should love me was more than she could stand. I was sent to a
boarding-school, and when I was twenty I began to teach. Dolores didn't
like Stephen, either. She grudged every penny her husband spent for us.

"M