“I intend to take her home,” he said quietly.
“Sir, if I’d suspicioned you’d have cared, I’d never have kep her from ye all these years. I surely believed ye thought yerself well shut of her. For you will remember as you were terribly bitter against her, and wouldn’t so much as lay an eye on her.”
“That is true, Katty; but if I had known, she would have been a wonderful comfort to me.”
As these two talked together, Mary herself listened in white-faced, petrified silence. Surely she was dreaming! Either that or going out of her mind! During a sudden pause in the conversation there was not a sound to be heard, but the distant reaping machine, and the immediate purring of the white cat.
“Mary,” said the earl, suddenly turning to her, and speaking in a husky voice, as he took her hand in his. “Do you understand that all your foster-mother tells us is true, and that you are my daughter?”
Here he looked hard at the little fingers which lay so limply in his grasp, and Mary, having thrown her apron over her head, burst into a violent storm of sobbings.
“Oh, no! Faix, I couldn’t face it! No, no, I’m not going out of this,” she stammered in gasps behind the apron. “Sure, sir, I was born and reared here; my life is here—not among grand folks.”
“They are your own folks, Mary,” he said gently.
“Well, anyhow”—and she flung down her screen, and flashed upon him a pair of challenging wet eyes—“I’m no lady, and I’m dog ignorant; so what can you do with me?”
“Love you, my dear,” he answered, in a low voice.