"You should not have gone away and left her," she said reproachfully to Mrs. Wade. "You see she cannot do without you."

"I shall not leave her again," Mrs. Wade said. "She chooses me before all the world."

Oh, poor Terry! There was something of a definite choice in the words. They meant that Stella had chosen her mother before all the world might give her. And the poor boy was sitting just below them, bearing the time of waiting with as much patience as possible, listening to the sounds upstairs, his mother divined, with a beating heart.

"Won't you sit down?" said Lady O'Gara. "I cannot sit till you do."

"Thank you," replied Mrs. Wade, and sat down the other side of Stella. Her profile in the nurse's cap showed against the lamplight. It was a beautiful soft, composed profile, like Stella's own. And her manner was perfect in its quiet dignity. A Nature's lady, Lady O'Gara said to herself.

Lady O'Gara could not have told what inspired her next speech. It was certainly not premeditated.

"My son is waiting for me downstairs in your pretty room."

Mrs. Wade bowed her head without comment on Terry's waiting. "We were sorry to hear of the accident to Sir Shawn. I hope he is better," she said.

How quietly they were talking! It might have been just conventional drawing-room talk. No one looking on could have guessed at the web of difficulties they were snared in, at the tragedy that menaced so many harmless joys. Again Lady O'Gara felt surprise at her own attitude towards Mrs. Wade, at Mrs. Wade's towards her. She had no feeling of inequality, nothing of the attitude of the woman who has always been securely placed within reverence and affections, to the woman who has gone off the rails, even though she be more sinned against than sinning. Mrs. Wade met her so to speak on equal grounds. There was no indication in her manner of the woman who had stepped down from her place among honoured women.

And yet, the mere saying that Terry was in the house had somehow affected Mrs. Wade. There was agitation under the calm exterior. In the atmosphere there was something disturbed, electrical.

She hardly seemed to hear Lady O'Gara's answer to her inquiry about Sir Shawn. She got up after a few minutes, and, saying that she would get some tea, went out of the room; to recover her self-possession, Lady O'Gara thought.

When she had gone Stella turned her eyes on Lady O'Gara's face.

"When I get well," she said, "I am going away with my mother. It will be best for everybody. I shall begin a new life with her."

"Oh, Stella, child! You can't give us up like that! You have made your place in our hearts."

There were tears in Mary O'Gara's kind eyes and in her voice.

Stella reached out and patted her hand as though she were the older woman.

"You needn't think I shan't feel it," she said. "You have been dear to me, sweet to me; and I shall always love you. And poor Granny——" A little shiver ran through her and for a second she closed her eyes. "I am sorry for her, too, poor woman! but it will be kinder to you all for me to go away. I did think that I was going to die and that would have made it so much easier for every one. Only, now that my mother has come back and needs me, I must go on living—but at a distance from this place. Terry will forget me and marry Eileen and be very happy."

The tired voice trailed off into silence. Evidently the long speech had been an effort.

"Terry is obstinately faithful," said Lady O'Gara, with a sound like a sob in her voice. "But now, I think you have talked enough. Go to sleep, child. We shall have plenty of time for talk, even if you do keep to your resolve to leave us all."

Stella opened her eyes again to say:

"No one is ever to say a word against my mother. She never did anything wrong, my poor little mother, even if she was deceived. I honour her more than any one in the world."

"Don't talk about it, child. No one will dare to say anything," Lady O'Gara assured her, eager to stop something which she felt too poignant, too intolerable to be said or heard.

Almost at once Stella was asleep. There came a little knock at the door. It was Susan to say that, please would Lady O'Gara come down to tea, while she sat with Miss Stella.

Again Lady O'Gara felt the strangeness of it all. There was Mrs. Wade pouring out the tea, handing cakes and toast, doing the honours like any assured woman in her drawing-room—except that she would not take tea herself and could not be prevailed upon to sit down with them.

Once or twice Lady O'Gara thought she intercepted a soft, motherly glance, with something of beaming approval in it, directed from Mrs. Wade's eyes upon Terry. There was light upon Terry's dark head from Mrs. Wade's eyes. The boy was shy, ill at ease. He was dying to ask questions, but he felt that the situation craved wary walking. He fidgeted and grew red: looked this way and that; was manifestly uncomfortable.

None of them had heard the hall-door open nor any one enter, but Keep, stretched on the hearthrug, growled. Shot lying under the table answered him. From Michael, in the kitchen, came a sharp hysterical barking. Michael was not so composed, not so entirely well-mannered as his brothers of the famous Shot breed.

The door opened. In came Mrs. Comerford, tall, in her trailing blacks, magnificent, the long veil of her bonnet floating about her. She looked from one to the other of the group with amazement.

"I am surprised to find you here, Mary O'Gara," she said. "But perhaps you come to see my child. Where is Stella? I have brought the carriage to take her back to Inch."

"Oh, the poor child is too ill to be moved," said Lady O'Gara tremblingly.

"You should be by your husband's side," Mrs. Comerford said, as though Mary O'Gara was still the child she had loved and oppressed.

She had not looked at Mrs. Wade since the first bitter contemptuous glance. Suddenly Mrs. Wade spoke with an air as though she swept the others aside. She faced Mrs. Comerford with eyes as steady as her own.

"Stella will not go with you, she said. She stays with me."

"You! her nurse. I did not know the child was so ill as to need a hospital nurse."

"Her mother, Mrs. Comerford. You did not satisfy her in all those years since you took her from my breast. I take her back again."



CHAPTER XXVII

THE STORY IS TOLD

Lady O'Gara's first terror was of a scene which should waken Stella and alarm her in her weak state. She made as if to stand between the two women: she looked fearfully for the signs of the rising storm as she remembered them in Mrs. Comerford, the heaving breast, the working hands, the dilated nostrils. But there were none of these signs. Instead Mrs. Comerford was curiously quiet.

For a moment the quietness seemed to possess the little house. In the silence you might have heard a pin drop. Shot sighed windily under the table and Keep laid his nose along his paws and turned eyes of worship on his mistress. Long afterwards Mary O'Gara remembered these things and how the wind sprang up and drove a few dead leaves against the window with a faint tinkling sound.

Then the momentary tense silence was broken.

"You are Stella's mother—Terence's..."

What she would have said was for ever unsaid.

"Your son's wife, Mrs. Comerford," said Mrs. Wade proudly. She held out her hand with a gesture which had a strange dignity. On the wedding finger was a thin gold ring.

There was a silence, a gasp. Mrs. Comerford leant across the table and stared at the ring.

"Terence's wife!" she repeated slowly. "You don't expect me to believe that! Why, my God, if it were true"—her voice rose to a sudden anguish—"if it were true, if it could be true—why didn't you tell me long ago? Why did you let me go on thinking such things of my boy? I won't believe it. I tell you I won't believe it. You would have been quick enough to step into my place, old Judy Dowd's granddaughter! Is it likely you'd have gone all these years without your child—in disgrace—the mother of a child born out of wedlock? It's a lie—Bride Sweeney, it's a lie!"

"It is not a lie," Mrs. Wade said wearily. "I know it seems incredible. There is no difficulty about proof. We were married in Dublin, when Terence was at the Royal Barracks and I was staying with Maeve McCarthy, a school-friend. She was my bridesmaid."

Mrs. Comerford put a bewildered hand to her head. Her other hand clutched the rail of a chair as though her head reeled. Lady O'Gara and Terence looked on as spectators, out of it, though passionately interested. Lady O'Gara gave a quick glance at her son. There was a strange light on his face. He put out his hand and steadied Mrs. Comerford, helping her to a chair. As she sat down, the long black draperies floating about her, she looked more than ever a tragedy queen.

"You have your marriage certificate?" she asked with an effort.

"I have never parted with it."

"If you are not mad, will you tell me why you masqueraded as my son's mistress when you were his wife?"

"Because your son was so afraid of you—you may believe it or not as you will—that he made me swear never to tell it to any one till he gave me leave. Poor Terence! He did not live to give me leave. He had made up his mind to tell you. He said our child should be born in his old home. Then he was killed, and my baby was born, and the world was at an end for me. I only wanted to go away and die somewhere. My grandmother had been terrible; and then you came and you were terrible too: and you took away my baby. I don't think I knew or thought how it was going to affect the baby. You said that she would be brought up to inherit Inch if I never claimed her. I was very innocent, very ignorant. I kept the oath I had sworn to Terence. I have kept it all these years."

"He need not have been afraid of me," Mrs. Comerford said in a heart-broken voice. "I loved him so much that I could have forgiven him his marriage. Do you think that I would have kept your place from you all these years? That I would have lied and lied to keep the world from knowing what I thought the shameful secret of Stella's birth?"

"I think nothing. I only know that he who was afraid of nothing else was afraid of your anger."

The two women stared at each other. Something of pity came into Mrs. Wade's face.

"It might be that he loved you so well he couldn't bear to bring you trouble," she said. "I was only a poor girl from the village, Judy Dowd's grand-daughter, who served in the bar of the little public-house. It would have been a bitter story for you to hear, and you so proud."

"Terence would have raised his wife to his own station. What insanity! I was always hot-tempered but I soon cooled and forgave. What was there in my anger for my six-foot son to be afraid of?"

Mary O'Gara remembered how Terence shook with terror of his mother's anger after some boyish escapade. Grace Comerford deceived herself! Apparently she had no idea of how terrible her fits of temper could be, how the fear of them overclouded the lives of children, defenceless before her.

"You wanted her," Mrs. Wade indicated Lady O'Gara—"for Terence's wife. It was not likely you could have put up with me instead."

"She preferred Shawn O'Gara," said Mrs. Comerford, with a queer bitterness. "I might have turned to you who loved Terence. I had nothing against Shawn O'Gara. He loved Terence better than a brother. I meant not to lose sight of you though I forbade you ever to claim the child. You disappeared from the place where I had sent you. I did not mean you to want for anything. After all you were Terence's."

Her voice ended on a queer note of tenderness.

Suddenly Terry O'Gara spoke, coming out of his corner, the bright light on his glowing eager young face.

"Stella will not refuse to listen to me, now," he said. "You will not refuse me Stella, Mrs. Comerford?"

He addressed Mrs. Wade. The name sounded most strangely in the ears of those who heard it. The woman addressed coloured and looked at him with softly parted lips. Her eyes were suddenly dewy.

"If it had been as ... as ... the poor darling thought," the boy blushed vividly, averting his gaze from the face that was so like Stella's in its softness and wonder and shyness—"it would have made no difference. My mother knows. It would have made no difference. The only barrier would have been Stella herself. I was afraid of Stella's will."

"Stella must decide for herself. Thank God, she did not turn from her mother. I thought I would go away and that this tale need never be told. I knew I had been wrong to come back. I never thought any one would have had the heart to tell my child that story."

She turned suddenly accusing eyes on Mrs. Comerford.

"Even yet she does not know that I was married to her father," she went on. "But she does not shrink from me. My little daughter! That such an anguish as that should ever have come to her! She has chosen me even so before all the world!"

She lifted her head proudly as she said it. Then her expression softened as she saw the shadow on Terry O'Gara's candid face.

"Give her time," she said. "If your father and mother will not mind her being my daughter—why—I think you should ask her."

"Where have you been hiding yourself all this time?" Mrs. Comerford asked, with a certain roughness. "If I had known where you were I might have extracted this story from you earlier. I suppose it is true. How I have suffered by your folly! Do you know that I have had hard thoughts of my dead son—that he disgraced me?"

"He thought you would call his marriage disgrace."

"He wronged me there. It would have been a bitter pill, but I'd have got over it. To think of all those years during which I believed that my one son had betrayed a girl and left her to suffer the shame."

"You should not have thought it; you were his mother," Mrs. Wade, or Mrs. Comerford, said simply. Then she settled down as to a story-telling.

"My grandmother kept her word to you, Mrs. Comerford," she said. "You told her I was not to come back. She did not live very long after we left Killesky. We had reached Liverpool on our way to America, and she became ill there. She was very old and she had gipsy blood. She thought I had disgraced her. Even then I kept my oath to Terence, till almost the very end when she was dying—I thought he would forgive—I whispered in her ear that I was married. She died happy because of that word."

"What folly it was! What cruel folly!" the other woman said, as though she were in pain.

"I came back again," Mrs. Wade went on, "after some years. I did go to America, but the homesickness was terrible. It was bad enough wanting the child, but wanting the country was a separate pain. It was like a wolf in my heart. I used to look at an Irish face in the street and wonder if the man or woman suffered as I did. I believe that if I had had Stella I should have still suffered as much, or nearly as much."

"I know," Mrs. Comerford said. "It was not as bad with me, but I had to come back."

"I did not dare come near Killesky, though I knew that trouble had altered me. I came to Drumlisk on the other side of the mountain. You had been generous, Mrs. Comerford, and my grandmother had saved money and I wanted for nothing. I lived in a little cottage there and I nursed the poor. Father Anthony O'Connell, the priest there, was very good to me. He is a dear old saint. He had a terrible woman for housekeeper. She had a wicked tongue, and she persecuted him with her tantrums, and half-starved him because she was too lazy to cook for him or get up in the morning to keep his house. He used to say—'Ah well, she doesn't drink!' He'd find some good in the worst. He wouldn't get rid of her, but at last she got rid of herself. She went off to look after a distant cousin, who was old and dying and had a little money to leave. I hope she didn't hasten the creature's death. I was with him three months—I loved to work for him: he was such an old saint and so grateful—when she came back and wanted to take up the place again. She hadn't got the money, I believe, after all. But by that time I knew more about her than the saintly old man did, and I threatened to tell, and so got rid of her. I was very happy there at Drumlisk—there was a light upon the house. Why wouldn't there be with a Saint in it? and the least thing you did for him he was so grateful. I told him about my marriage and the oath I'd taken. He absolved me from that oath. He said it wasn't binding, and that I was in the wrong to let people think me something I was not, much less the wrong to the child deprived of her father as well as her mother."

"He was quite right there," Mrs. Comerford said. "I never had Stella's heart. She wanted you if she could not have her father."

"I had too low an opinion of myself. I said to myself that Stella would grow up a lady and I was a poor woman. I had done better for her by not claiming her, no matter what sorrow it had meant to me. I had my spies out all the time. Lizzie Brennan recognized me one day she wandered into the church at Drumlisk when I was cleaning the sanctuary lamp. It was no use denying it. She knew me. I made her promise she'd never tell. The creature was grateful for the little I could do for her. She told me Inch was empty all those years. Then, when Father O'Connell died, and I was in grief for him, she came and told me Mrs. Comerford had come back with the little lady. The longing grew on me—I was very lonely and so I came to Waterfall Cottage, that I might see the child I'd been longing for all my days."

"You should have walked into Inch and said out that you were my son's lawful wife. I am not the woman to turn my back on his wife, even though you were Judy Dowd's grandchild," Mrs. Comerford said fiercely.

"I never thought of doing that. I only wanted to get a glimpse of the child now and again. Then you, Lady O'Gara, brought her to me, and the love leapt up alive between us the minute we met. I gave myself up to it for a while, feeling as though I was committing a sin all the time. Then I was frightened by old Lizzie. She discovered somehow that Stella was my daughter. She was getting less reliable, being so old. I did not want to stand between Stella and her happiness." She looked at Terry. "So I ran away, meaning to send for my things. I never meant to come back. I returned to my old cottage at Drumlisk till I could make up my mind where I was to go to. Lizzie found me there. It is a long way over the mountains. She walked it in the wind and rain to tell me Stella was here and pining for me—so I came."

"Go up and tell the child, if she can listen to you, that we are friends," Mrs. Comerford said. "Tell her you are Terence's wife and my daughter. Tell her I am not such an ogre as she thinks and you think. Tell her that you and she are to come to Inch as soon as she can be moved. Tell her all that, Mrs. Terence Comerford. Perhaps then she will consent to see me."

She pointed a long finger at Stella's mother, looking more than ever like a priestess, and Mrs. Wade, as she had called herself, obeyed meekly.

When the door closed behind her Mrs. Comerford turned to Terry.

"Good-bye," she said. "The future will be yours. You are like your mother, and she never had any worldly wisdom. I love you for it, but now you had better go."

So Terry and his mother went away, passing in the dark road Mrs. Comerford's carriage with its bright lights and champing and impatient horses.



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE VIGIL

Some time in the night when Lady O'Gara had nodded in the chair beside her husband's bed, she came awake sharply to the knowledge that he had called her name.

"Mary! Mary!"

She could not have dozed for long, since the fire which she had made up was burning brightly.

"Yes, Shawn, I am here," she answered.

"Move your chair so that I may see your face. I want to talk to you."

His voice was quite strong. There was something in the sound of it that spoke of recovering strength.

"I've been lying awake some little time," he said. "I didn't like to wake you, you poor sweet woman. I liked to hear your breathing so softly there close to me—as you have been all these years."

"You are better, Shawn, wonderfully better," she said, leaning down to see his face, for firelight and the shaded lamp did not much assist her short-sighted eyes.

"I am free of pain," he answered. "I don't know when it may return. Give me something to keep me going while I talk."

She gave him a few spoonfuls of a strong meat extract mixed with brandy, supporting his head on her arm while he took the nourishment.

"How young you look, Mary," he said, when she had laid down his head again on the pillow. "Sit there, just where you are. What a burthen I have been to you all these years, holding me up from the abyss. And yet your eyes and your skin are like a child's. I suppose it is prayer and quiet and honest thoughts."

"You really feel able to talk, Shawn?" she asked anxiously.

"I feel as strong as a horse at this moment. That stuff is potent. But I had better talk while I am able. There is much I want to tell you, Mary, and there may be no great time."

Her eyes looked at him in dumb protest, but she said not a word.

"To go back to the beginning, Mary. I have not told you all the truth about myself and Terence. It was not the loss of my friend that darkened my life. That would have been unnatural when I had you beside me. It was—Mary—it was I who sent Terence Comerford to his death."

"You, Shawn! You are dreaming! There was more than the love of brothers between you!"

"My mind is perfectly clear. You won't turn away from me when I tell you? My need of you is bitter."

She dropped on her knees by the bed and laid her face against his hand. She did not want him to see her eyes while he told his story.

"Nothing could make me turn away from you," she answered. "Nothing, nothing. We are everything to each other."

"You are everything to me. But you have Terry. I am fond of Terry, but I have only need of you. I will tell you what happened the night Terence was killed. I had been praying and pleading with him to right Bridyeen, for I knew that there was a baby coming. Never had I so pleaded with any one. I remember that I sweated for sheer anguish, although the night was cold. I don't know what possessed Terence, unless it was the whisky. He told me to go and marry you and leave his affairs alone. And then he laughed. A laugh can be the most terrible and intolerable thing in the world. It maddened me. It was not only poor Bride; but there was you. I thought he would leave Bride and her baby and go back to you. I believed you loved him. I begged and prayed him not to laugh, and he but laughed the louder. He said hateful things; but it was not what he said; it was the way he laughed. It mocked as a devil might have mocked, or I thought it did. It drove me mad. I knew Spitfire would not take the whip and that Terence was in no state to control her. I leant out and I lashed her with all my strength. I can remember shouting something while I did it. Then Spitfire was off, clattering down the road—and suddenly the madness died in me. I would have given my life for his, but I had killed him. I had killed myself. I have never since been the man I was when Terence and I were closer than brothers."

He ended with a sob.

"You can't forgive me, Mary?" he asked, in a terrified whisper, as she did not speak. "For God's sake say something."

She got up and put her arms about his head. Whatever grief or horror there was in her face he should not see it. She laid her face against his, embracing him closely and softly.

"The only thing I find it hard to forgive," she whispered, "is your not telling me. It would not have been so bad if you had told me, Shawn. I could have helped you to bear it. I could have carried at least half your burden."

"You understand, Mary," he asked in a wondering voice, "that when I struck Spitfire, I meant to kill Terence."

"It was madness," she said. "I would almost say it was justifiable madness. No one could believe it was deliberate."

"A jury might have brought it in manslaughter," he said. "Only for you and Terence I would have tested it long ago. You cannot imagine what a weight I have carried. Even telling it has eased me as though a stone had been rolled from off my heart."

"You should have shared it," she said. "That is all I have to forgive—that you carried it alone all those years."

"Oh, incomparable woman!" he said. "Indeed I have felt the wrong I did you in marrying you, in chaining your brightness and sweetness to a doomed man like me."

"You have made me perfectly happy," she said. "I would not have changed my lot for anything else in the world. Why do you talk of doom? It is going to be happiness for both of us now that you have spoken at last."

"I have made you happy?" he asked wonderingly. "Why, if I have, it is not so bad after all."

"Did Patsy know?" she asked on a sudden thought.

"Patsy knew, though he has tried to keep the fact of his knowledge from me. He must have heard what I said. One other knew and has blackmailed me ever since. No matter how much money I gave him he came back again. I was so weary of it and so weary of the burthen I was carrying that the last time I refused him. He went away cursing and swearing that he would have me brought to justice. I felt I didn't care. I told him to do his worst. He is the husband of that poor thing you sheltered at the South lodge, one of the many your goodness has comforted. A bad fellow through and through."

"He will not harm us, Shawn. He is dead. He was found with a broken neck just by the doorway of the Admiral's tomb. He must have stepped over the edge of the Mount not knowing there was a steep fall."

"I am glad for your sake and Terry's. For my own sake I should welcome any atonement."

He went on in a low voice.

"A strange thing happened to me—when was it—the day I went hunting?"

"It is the third day since that day."

"I did not know it was so long. You remember that Black Prince was lame. That was why Patsy was late. He wanted me not to ride Mustapha, but I was determined. The horse went all right during the day—a bit difficult and sulky at some of the jumps, but I kept coaxing him and got him along. It was a long day. We put up three foxes. The last gave us a smart run before we lost him the other side of Altnabrocky. It was late by then and it was raining. You'd think Mustapha would have come home quietly. There was the devil in him, poor brute; and Patsy could not exorcise it. I suppose he is dead?"

"He broke his back."

"Ah, well, he meant to break mine, I think. You know what wild country there is about Altnabrocky. The dusk came fast and I lost my way. I knew it was going to be very dark before the moon rose; the rain was beating in my face and Mustapha kept jibbing and trying to turn round, for he hated the rain and the wind on his eyes. I was considering whether I ought to lead him, and wondering where on earth we were, when a low white light came under the rim of an immense cloud. It was like daylight come back for a little while. By the light I saw a little farmhouse up a boreen off the road. I was dreading to lose the road in the darkness, for it was not much more than a track. Mustapha had been dancing about a bit, but suddenly he whinnied and made a rush for the boreen. It was all right, as I wanted to go there, but he'd have gone whether I wanted to or not.

"An extraordinary thing happened. The door of the cottage opened and out stepped a little old man. I could see his figure against the light within: and Mustapha, who was such a devil with all of us, started whinnying and nuzzling the old fellow, who seemed just as delighted to see him.

"'How far am I from the main road to Galway?' I asked; for I knew I'd be all right once I got on to that. I had quite lost my bearings.

"'A matter of a couple of miles, your honour,' said he. I saw then that he was a little innocent-looking old man like a child, and I remembered Patsy's description of the one he'd bought Mustapha from in the fair of Keele.

"'The horse seems to know you,' said I.

"'It's a foal of me own rarin',' said he, 'an' more betoken he was out of a mare that kilt a man, an' a fine man—poor Mr. Terence Comerford, Lord rest him! She was a beauty, an' I could do anything with her. She was sent to the fair to be sold and no one 'ud touch her. I got her for a twinty-pound note. Only for her foals the roof wouldn't be over me head. This wan was the last o' them.'"

Sir Shawn's voice failed and died away.

"Give me a little more of that stuff, Mary," he said weakly. "I want to finish, and then I can sleep. You don't know how it has oppressed me."

She obeyed him, and, after an interval, he went on again.

"So that was where Spitfire went. I never could make out. And there was I riding a colt of hers, and a worse one than Spitfire to manage. I had great difficulty in getting Mustapha away from his old master, but at last I succeeded, and we jogged along: as he covered the long road he seemed to become quieter. I think I dozed in the saddle. I know I thought it was Spitfire I was riding and not Mustapha. I remember calling him Spitfire as I woke up and encouraged him.

"The night was as dark as I expected, but there was some glimmer from overhead and I could see the bog-pools either side of us as we crossed the bog. It wasn't much guidance to keep us to the road, but we'd crossed the railway bridge, and I could see the lights of Castle Talbot; I was lifting my heart towards you, Mary, as I've always done at that point when—something ran across the road—it might have been only a rabbit—just under Mustapha's feet. Then he was out of control. He reared backwards towards the bog, trying to throw me. I had a struggle with him. It could hardly have lasted a minute, but it seemed a long time. There did not seem any chance for either of us; all I could think of was that I was riding Spitfire's son and that he was going to kill me, and that, maybe, it was a sort of reparation I had to make. Besides, I should be free of Baker and his threats, and he could never harm you through me. But all the time the instinct to live was strong, and I'd got my feet clear of the stirrups, for I didn't want to go with him into the bog. Then he threw me and I heard his hoofs tearing at the stones of the road as he went over, and he squealed. It's horrible to hear a horse squeal, Mary."

He ended with a long sigh of exhaustion.

"Now you are not to talk any more," she said. "The doctor would be angry with me if he knew I had let you talk so much."

"I had to get it off," he said. "I am going to sleep till morning now. Dear Terence! He would have forgiven me if he knew how I suffered."

"He has forgiven you," she said steadily. "I want to tell you, before you sleep, that Terence had married Bride Sweeney secretly. He swore her to silence, because he dreaded his mother's anger; and, poor girl, she bore all that unmerited shame and the loss of her child to keep faith with him."

"He had married her after all!"

Sir Shawn, by an immense effort lifted his head from the pillows. There was a strange light on his face.

"I thought I had cut Terence off in his sins, I who loved him. I said he would wake up in Hell. Terence has been in Heaven all these years. It has been Hell to me that I had sent Terence to Hell. Now I can sleep."

He slept quietly all through the morning hours, till Reilly came to relieve her.

"He looks a deal better, m'lady," said Reilly, looking at him curiously. "I thought yesterday, if you'll excuse me, m'lady, that you were going to lose him. He has taken a new lease of life."

Later on Dr. Costello corroborated Reilly's verdict.

"Something has worked a miracle," he said, patting Lady O'Gara's hand kindly. "I should have said yesterday that we could not keep him very long. There is a marked change for the better. I've been watching Sir Shawn these many years back and I was never satisfied with him."

"There! there!" he said as the joy broke out over her face. "Don't be too glad, my dear lady. I was afraid the spine might have been injured, or something internal. I have made a thorough examination this morning. He is not seriously injured in any way. His thinness and lightness must have saved him when he was thrown. He is very thin. We must fatten him. But, my dear lady, he is going to be more or less of an invalid. There is heart-trouble. No more strenuous days for him! He will have to live with great care. You will be tied to him, Lady O'Gara. I can see he depends on you for everything. He will be more dependent than ever."

He said to himself, looking at her wonderfully fresh beauty—the beauty of a clear soul—that it would be hard on her to be tied up to a sick man. But her face, which had been changing during his speech, was now uplifted.

"If I can only keep him," she said, "all the rest will be nothing. He is going to be so happy with me."

She said it as though she made a vow.



CHAPTER XXIX, AND LAST

THE LAKH OF RUPEES

Mrs. Comerford acted with characteristic thoroughness. Perhaps she felt that she had much to atone for.

It was Christmas Day by the time Stella could be moved to Inch, where amazement reigned. Mrs. Comerford had given her orders. Miss Stella's room was to be prepared. She was coming back again, with her mother. The Bride's Room, which was the finest bedroom at Inch, was to be prepared for Mrs. Terence Comerford.

Mrs. Clinch, to whom the order was given, gasped.

"Mrs. Terence Comerford, ma'am?" she repeated.

"Yes: I hope you're not becoming deaf. My son was married, and Miss Stella is his daughter. He chose to keep his marriage a secret. I have only just learnt that his wife is living."

No more than that. Mrs. Comerford was not a person to ask questions of. She went her way serenely, with a queer air of happiness about her while Inch was swept and garnished. Of course Clinch and Mrs. Clinch debated these amazing happenings with each other; of course the servants buzzed and the news spread to the village and about the countryside with amazing swiftness.

Christmas morning saw the transference from the Waterfall Cottage to Inch accomplished. Stella was by this time able to sit up for the journey, and since there could be no proper Christmas festivity at Castle Talbot Terry O'Gara was to lunch at Inch. He was witness of the strange ceremonial air with which Mrs. Comerford laid down her seals of office, so to speak.

"Mrs. Terence Comerford will take the head of the table," she said.

Then she passed to the foot of the table while Mrs. Terence, flushed and half tearful, took the vacated place.

Terry was in the seventh heaven. There was no longer anything between him and Stella, who had accepted him as though their happiness had never been threatened. Stella, with that air of illness yet about her which made her many times more dear and precious to her lover, looked with shining eyes from her mother to her grandmother.

In the drawing-room afterwards, while Stella rested in her own pretty room, and her mother, rather overwhelmed by her new estate, sat by her, Mrs. Comerford talked to Terry.

"It is a long Winter here," she said. "I remember frost and snow in January when it was dangerous to walk across your own lawn because of the drifts. If the snow does not come it will be wild and wet. Stella was brought up in Italy. I should hurry up the marriage, young man, and take her away. Now that your father is going on so well there is no reason for delay. Besides, we want to get it out of her head that she was pursued by some ruffian the night she wandered and fell by the empty lodge at Athvara."

"Poor little angel," said Terry, "I am only too anxious, Mrs. Comerford. I shall be the happiest man alive if she will consent."

"Of course she will consent. She is an obedient child," said Mrs. Comerford, with an entire oblivion of Stella's marked disobedience in the not very remote past.

"It is adorably unselfish of you to be willing to part with her," said Terry, his face shining with happiness.

"For the matter of that I shall have my daughter-in-law," said Mrs. Comerford superbly. "She has never travelled. We shall probably do some travelling together. You had better resign your commission."

"Oh, must I? I might get a year's leave because of my ... Stella's health. I am very fond of the Regiment. But of course I should not put it before her."

"Of course not. I don't mind your sticking to the Regiment, as you say, for a bit longer. Your father and Stella's father each took their turn at soldiering. It is as well to be prepared—in case of need. There might be a bolt out of the blue sky. So much more reason for being happy while we may."

"You know that Susan Horridge—or Mrs. Baker, but she won't be called that—identified the dead man I found by the Admiral's tomb as her husband?"

"Yes, I heard so. A good riddance. I wonder if he was hunting for Susan and the boy when he met with that accident. He was 'warm' as the children say, close up against Waterfall Cottage. You are to make Stella forget that dream of hers of being pursued by some terrible creature that night."

"I will do my best," said Terry. "A pity some one does not take Athvara! It is a fine old house all falling to rack and ruin."

"I have heard a rumour that some Order is buying it for a boys' school. That would be best of all. A crowd of boys about would soon banish the ghosts. They would delight in the Admiral's tomb. My own boy and Shawn O'Gara, your father, made a cache there one cold Winter, pretending they were whalers in the North Sea. It was the time of Dr. Nansen. The tomb used to be open then. They had all sorts of queer things stowed away under the shelf that held the Admiral's coffin. Queer things, boys!"

She looked into the fire for a few minutes.

"Your father loved my boy," she said. "I believe he'd have died to save him. There was a time when I was angry against him, because he lived and was warm and my boy was cold, and because your mother had married him. I always looked to see her my Terence's wife. I was wrong. Terence had chosen his own wife."

The marriage was fixed for early in the New Year. Every one seemed extremely happy. Terence had got his leave of absence for a year. Stella was making excellent progress and had begun to take a shy interest in the preparations for the wedding and the details of the wedding journey. She had seen Sir Shawn, lying on the invalid couch which had the very latest improvements to make his invalid's lot as easy as possible. He had drawn down her face to his and kissed it, saying something inexplicable to Stella.

"You are the dove with the olive branch to say that the floods have retreated."

He was very happy about the marriage, and Lady O'Gara, watching him as though he were a beloved and delicate child, smiled at his saying, a bright brave smile which made Stella say afterwards to Terry that his mother's smile was like Winter sunshine.

"It used to be so full of fun," said Terry, "her dimples used to come and go, but she is troubled about my father, though she says she is the happiest woman alive, because she can keep him perhaps for a long time yet."

Patsy Kenny was painting and papering his house in the stable yard, in the intervals of his professional labours, whistling over his work. Mrs. Horridge, as she still called herself, was back at the South lodge with Georgie, and old Lizzie Brennan as her lodger.

"The old soul," she said to Lady O'Gara. "I'll always find room for her. She do take on so when it comes over her that she might go to the 'Ouse. I've promised her she shan't. Wasn't it clever of her, m'lady, to go off and find Miss Stella's Ma for her. I don't believe Miss Stella would be with us this day if it weren't for that. I never saw a young lady so set on her Ma. M'lady," she drew Lady O'Gara away from the gate by which they were standing talking, a little way along the avenue where no listener could hear—"I've told Miss Stella a lie, and I'm not sorry for it, although I'm a truthful woman. It was a big lie too. I told her that there terror she had of runnin' and runnin' from somethink dreadful was but the fever. I told her she dreamed it. But I'd never have got it out of her head if her Ma hadn't come."

She turned away and was silent for a minute. Then she spoke again in a low voice.

"It was the drink," she said. "The Lord forgive all the wicked!"

One of these days Lady O'Gara was saying to herself that she must read and answer all the letters that had come to her while Sir Shawn still claimed her constant attention. There was a heaped basket of them on the desk in her own room. It was a very chilly afternoon. Sir Shawn was asleep upstairs. Presently Reilly and Patsy Kenny would carry him down on his wonderful couch. Terry was over at Inch. He was to bring back Stella, and later on they were to be joined at dinner by Mrs. Comerford and Mrs. Terence.

"I'm afraid no one ever wrote to tell poor Eileen," Lady O'Gara said to herself, with a whimsical glance at the letter basket and the flanking waste-paper basket. The telling that was in her mind referred to the approaching marriage of Terry and Stella. Eileen had been notified of Sir Shawn's illness and had written expressing her concern. But Eileen never could write a letter. The formal and ill-constructed phrases conveyed nothing. Somewhat to Lady O'Gara's surprise Eileen had not offered to return. But after that formal letter another letter had come, quite a thick one, and it lay still unopened amid the accumulated letters.

"Poor Eileen! I wonder if there was anything in Terry's story about the lakh of rupees!"

The thought had but entered her mind when she heard, or thought she heard, the sound of approaching carriage-wheels. She listened. It might be Dr. Costello, who had a way of coming on friendly visits very often. Or perhaps Terry and Stella were coming earlier than she had expected them.

The door opened. In came a young woman wearing magnificent furs, bringing with her a scent of violets. Eileen!

She flung her arms about Lady O'Gara with an unaccustomed demonstrativeness. But she turned a cold satin cheek to the lady's kiss. It had been characteristic of Eileen even in small childhood that in moments of apparently greatest abandonment she had never kissed but always turned her cheek to be kissed.

"Since you wouldn't write, dearest Cousin Mary," she cried in a voice strangely affected to Lady O'Gara's ear, "I've come to see what is the matter. And I've brought my husband."

A shortish man with a keen, clear, plain face came from behind the shadow of Eileen and her furs. Lady O'Gara had a queer thought. She recognized Eileen's furs for sables. She had never attained to sables. The coat must have cost three hundred guineas. How quick Eileen had been about her marriage! And how soon she had begun to spend the lakh!

Meanwhile her lips were saying—

"I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Gillespie. But what a surprise! I did not think Eileen had had time even to get engaged."

"You see there was so little to be done," the lakh responded in a very pleasant voice, which at once secured Lady O'Gara's liking. Besides, his hand-clasp was very warm, so unlike Eileen's chilly cheek. She hoped Eileen was going to be good to him. "I was Eileen's slave always. She had refused me innumerable times. She only had to say she had changed her mind and I procured a special licence."

"You will take off your furs, Eileen. Of course you and Dr. Gillespie will stay. Sir Shawn is so much better. And you have to hear all our news. You have sent away your car?"

Eileen was taking off the sables, and flinging them carelessly to one side, as though three hundred guinea sables were things of common experience with her. The rose-silk lining fairly dazzled Lady O'Gara's amused eyes, so sumptuous was it.

"Only between two trains, dearest Cousin Mary. We are going to London on our way to Italy. We've been married a week and have been boring each other dreadfully at Recess. I am longing for Italy, but I felt I must see you and introduce Bobbin. We have till seven o'clock to stay."

Lady O'Gara glanced at the bridegroom to whom his bride had given so absurd a name. He was looking amusedly, if adoringly, at Eileen. He had a good strong chin, a firm mouth, which was sweet when he smiled: his grey eyes were quizzical. She thought the marriage would be all right.

"I am going to get warm in the sun," said Eileen with a little shiver. "You see Bobbin has to go back to work. He has taken a house in Harley Street and we wish to settle in as early as possible. There has been an article in the Medical Journal."

"In fact London can't wait till I put up my brass plate, Lady O'Gara," Dr. Gillespie said, with twinkling eyes.

Reilly came to ask if he should bring tea.

"Yes, please; Mr. Terry and Miss Stella will be here very shortly."

Lady O'Gara thought she had better prepare Eileen, who had always had the air of Terry being her property.

"Our great news, after my husband being so well," she said, "is that Terry and Stella are going to be married almost immediately. By the way, they too are going to Italy. Perhaps you may meet there."

Eileen opened her eyes wide and lifted her hands, with a side look at her husband.

"I am so glad," she said. "Do you know, Cousin Mary, the one drawback to my happiness—you see I always cared for Bobbin, since we were small children—was the dread that Terry might mind."



THE END