"Oh, the poor boy!" said Lady O'Gara again, with the soft illogicality that her lovers loved in her. "But, Stella, love, you cannot stay here. Think how people would talk. Come home with me. You can wait just as well at Castle Talbot. Every day you shall come and see if she has returned. It would be better, of course, for you to go back to Inch…"
"But Granny will lock me in my room. I cannot go to Castle Talbot, for
Sir Shawn would look coldly at me and I should not like that."
Lady O'Gara was suddenly decided. "You cannot stay here, Stella," she said. "It is quite out of the question."
In her own mind was a whirl of doubt and fear. Who was going to tell Stella? Who was going to tell her? Apparently Stella suspected no worse than that she was peasant-born. She had not yet arrived at the point of asking for her father. At any moment she might ask. What was any one to answer?
"Come with me, dear child," she said. "My husband comes home
dead-tired these hunting days, has some food and stumbles off to bed.
I am all alone. We can have the days together. I will write to your
Granny that you are paying me a visit. Let us lock up here."
Some one paused in the road outside the window to look in, leaning impudently on the green paling. It was a ragged tramp bearded like the pard.
As he shuffled on his way Lady O'Gara said with a rather nervous laugh.
"There, Stella! You see the impossibility of your being here alone. I wonder where that creature came from! We don't get many of his sort here. Think of the night in this place! We could not possibly allow it. Mrs. Wade is sure to come back. She would not have gone away leaving all her things here. Was the door open when you came to it?"
"It was locked. I found the key where she used to put it if she went out. She sometimes walked over there across the Mount, where the people do not walk because they are afraid of the O'Hart ghosts. I thought I would wait for her till she came back."
"Let us lock up and put the key where she left it. She is sure to return. The place does not look as if she were not coming back."