She had half-expected to find it locked, but it was open. There was a thick carpet of dead leaves on the gravel sweep. Between the boughs sparsely clothed with leaves and the slender tree-trunks she caught a glimpse of the bronze and amber river running over its stones, or winding about the big dripping boulders that were in the bed of the stream. A damp, rheumatic place, she said to herself, although she loved the river; and its backwaters, full of wild duck and dabchick and the moorhens, were enchanting places.
The grounds which she remembered as neglected and overgrown had become orderly. The little beds cut in the turf were neat in their Winter bareness, despite a few dead leaves which had fluttered on to them. Her eyes fell on a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel lying on the grass by one of the beds. From the open mouth of a brown paper bag a bulb had partly rolled before it became stationary. There was a hole dug in the turf. Some one had been planting bulbs and had gone away leaving the task unfinished.
From the house-wall hung a branch of clematis torn down by the rough wind. A ladder stood close by. Some one had had the intention of nailing up the branch, and had not carried it into effect.
She lifted her hand to the knocker and found that the door yielded to her slight touch. It was open. For a second she had a wild thought that Miss Brennan might have been wandering in her wits—that Mrs. Wade, or Bridyeen Sweeney—she had come to calling her that in her mind—was still in the house.
She looked into the little hall. It was bright with a long ray from the white sun that peered below a cloud, seeming to her dazzled eyes surrounded by a coruscation of coloured rays. The white sun portended rain to come, probably in the afternoon.
Shot had pushed his way before her into the hall. She had almost forgotten that Shot had come with her when she had left the Poms at home because of the muddy roads. He had disappeared into Mrs. Wade's little parlour. The plume of his fine tail caught a flash from the sun's rays on its burnished bronze. She heard the dog whine.
No one answered her knock nor did Shot return, so, after a second's hesitation, she followed the dog.
She was not prepared for what she saw. The only occupant of the room beside the dog, who had dropped on to the hearthrug, and lay with his nose between his paws and his melancholy eyes watching, was Stella—Stella kneeling by a chair in an abandonment of grief, her face hidden.
The little figure kept its grace even in the huddled-up attitude. The face hidden in the chair, childishly, as though a child suffered pain, was lifted as Lady O'Gara touched the bronze-brown head. The misery of Stella's wide eyes shocked her. Stella's face was stained and disfigured by tears. The soft close hair, which she had taken to wearing plaited about her head, was ruffled and disordered.
"Stella, darling child!" Lady O'Gara said, with a gasp of consternation. She had never seen Stella before without brightness, the brightness of a bird. Now the small ivory pale face had lost the golden tints of its underlying brownness. The child was wan under the disfigurement of her tears.