One evening some ten days later Lady O'Gara, who had been out, arrived home with the dressing-bell. Hurrying upstairs, she found her husband in his dressing-room. He had had his bath: she noticed that his hair was wet as he stood in front of the glass, knotting his white cravat. He wore hunting things in the Winter evenings, and the scarlet coat, with the little facing of blue, became his dark skin and eyes.

"Is it you, Mary?" he asked, without turning round. "What kept you so late?"

"I forgot the time. I went to see Mrs. Wade, and found Stella there. I did not know she had been there since we brought Mrs. Wade a puppy to keep her company. Stella was on her way here. She had sent on her luggage, meaning to follow."

Sir Shawn turned about completely and stared at her. She saw that his face was disturbed.

"I wonder if it was wise to take Stella there!" he said. "Poor woman! One would not deny her any happiness. But—I warn you, Grace Comerford will not like it. There is another thing, Mary. Come in and shut the door. In a few minutes we shall have to go downstairs and talk platitudes. I could wish we were alone once more."

"Why, what is the matter, Shawn!" Lady O'Gara asked, coming forward in some alarm. "You don't feel ill?"

"I feel as well as ever I feel. But I've been infernally disturbed. Evelyn, quite gaily, and showing his white teeth, as he does when he laughs—I've nothing against Evelyn—frightened me by talking about Terry and Stella. He said it was delightful to see children so thoroughly in love. I pulled him up, rather short. He turned it off with a half apology, but I could see he did not believe me when I said there was nothing. 'Oh, they haven't told him.' I could see by his eyes that he thought that. I felt infernally frightened, I can tell you!"

"Oh, but why, Shawn?" Lady O'Gara's eyes fluttered nervously in the candlelight. She was frightened at her own complicity, really frightened for the first time. "Why shouldn't the poor children be happy? I know you like Eileen better than Stella. Still it is not a question of our choice."

She had been strangely, implicitly obedient to her husband during their married life, even when she might well have departed from obedience.

"What in God's Name are you talking about, Mary?" he asked and she felt vaguely shocked. Shawn had always been reverent in using the Name of His Creator. "It is not a question of my likes or dislikes. Why, for the matter of that, I can see little Stella with the poor lad's eyes well enough. But this thing simply cannot go on. It must be killed. God knows I don't want to hurt the boy. I'd give my life to make him happy, although I don't show him affection as you do, as you can. Is it possible you did not understand? Was I stupid about explaining to you? Don't you know that Stella is Terence's daughter?"

No; she had not known. That was plain enough in her face.

"Oh, no," she said in a bewildered way. "Stella is the daughter of
Gaston de St. Maur…."

"Grace Comerford said so, or she allowed people to believe it. Did she ever say so? Stella is the daughter of Terence Comerford and Bridyeen Sweeney, whom you know as Mrs. Wade. Don't you see now how impossible it is? I wish to Heaven Grace Comerford had not come back."

A sense of the piteousness, the pitilessness, of it all came
overwhelmingly to Mary O'Gara. She had been learning to love Stella.
The fond, ardent little creature had pushed herself into her heart.
What was to happen to them all, to Terry, to Stella, to herself?

"You are sure, Shawn?" she asked, rubbing her hands together as though she were cold. But while she asked the certainty was borne in upon her. It was the starved mother-love that had burned in Mrs. Wade's eyes as they rested on the girl. It was the unconscious daughterly tenderness, the mysterious attraction which had made Stella chatter on the homeward way of Mrs. Wade and how she pitied her, she knew not for what.

She threw out her hands in a gesture of despair.

"It seems we are all going to be hurt," she said. "I would not mind if it were not for the children. Why did Grace Comerford bring Stella where she and Terry were certain to meet? The boy was bound to find her irresistible?"

She remembered suddenly that the dinner bell might ring at any moment and that the patient Margaret MacKeon was waiting to help her to dress. She sighed. It was one of the moments when one finds the social demands hard to endure.

"One of us will have to tell Terry," she said. "It is not a pretty story. Poor little Stella!"

No one would have thought from Lady O'Gara's demeanour at the dinner table that Black Care pressed hard on her white shoulders. Sir Shawn had often said that when his wife chose she could put the young girls in the shade.

She put them in the shade to-night. She had a deep, brilliant spot of colour in either cheek. Her dress of leaf brown matched her eyes and hair. She had laid aside her other jewels for a close-fitting antique collar of garnets, the deep ruby of which suggested a like colour in the gown as it did in her eyes.

Eileen was out of it with Major Evelyn and pouted. Terry was tired and happy after his day of tramping over the bogs. He seemed content to watch Stella across the bowl of growing violets which was between them. Young Earnshaw talked nonsense and Stella dimpled and smiled. She had gained the colour of the moss rose-bud since she had come back to Ireland. There was a daintiness, a delicacy in her little face with the softly moulded, yet firm features, the grey-brown eyes with dark lashes, the arched fine brows, which would have made a plain face distinguished. Her head as she moved it about in the lamplight—she had bird-like gestures—showed a sheen like a pheasant's breast. Watching her miserably Sir Shawn O'Gara said to himself that Terence Comerford's red hair had come out as golden bronze on his daughter's pretty head.

He had a girl at either hand, as Lady O'Gara had the two male visitors. Terry, the odd man, had come round and slipped in between his father and Eileen, moving her table-napkin so that she sat between him and Major Evelyn. He and his father were almost equally silent from different reasons.

Eileen at first had been crumbling her bread, sending her food away untasted or only just tasted. She was vexed about something. It was not like Eileen to be capricious over her food.

Perhaps Lady O'Gara noticed the dissatisfaction and ascribed it to the fact that Eileen was not having the attention she desired, so she drew gently out of a very interesting discussion she was having with Major Evelyn and turned to little Earnshaw, an agreeably impudent boy, with cheeks like a Winter apple and an irresistibly jolly smile. He seemed to have got over his first shyness with Stella and was conducting his veiled love-making with a rather charming audacity. Lady O'Gara had glanced a little anxiously once or twice at Terry, but there was obviously only amusement at young Earnshaw's way in Terry's face. He must be very sure of Stella.

"Don't mind him," he said across the table while she watched. "He's ve............