The boy nodded, and Stella followed Mrs. Netherbridge, who, with frosty civility, showed her into a prim and old-maidish drawing-room, where she was soon joined by Dr. Netherbridge.
“Forgive me for disturbing you so early,” Stella began. The little doctor’s face inspired in her exactly the same feeling of confidence and friendliness which her mother had felt toward him years ago.
“I have come,” she continued, “because I think you are the only person who can and will tell me the truth on a most important point. Yesterday, when you saw me for the first time, you said you recognized me by my likeness to my mother. The present Lady Cranstoun and I are totally dissimilar; you cannot, therefore, have meant her.”
Her brilliant dark-blue eyes were fixed searchingly, imploringly upon his face. Dr. Netherbridge was too sincere not to change color and show some slight sign of embarrassment.
“Family likenesses are unaccountable things,” he was beginning, when she cut him short.
“There is no longer any need for concealment,” she said, eagerly. “Last night Sir Philip Cranstoun told me I was born in a hovel, and daughter of a gypsy. Are those things true?”
“You were certainly born in a small cottage on your father’s property in this neighborhood,” the doctor answered; “and your mother was of gypsy extraction.”
“Tell me all you can about her.”
“She must have been extremely beautiful when in good health. At the time when I first met her, she was very little older than you are now, but she was deliberately starving herself to death, and her beauty was necessarily impaired.”
“How did you come to know her?” she asked, hanging upon his words in deep anxiety. “Was she—was she allowed to come to the Chase?”