"If you will get up and dress and eat your breakfast to my satisfaction I shall go with you to Lizzie Brennan's lodge. It is only about half a mile down the road. You have been too much in the house."
She went away downstairs, leaving Stella to get up and dress. There was a dainty little breakfast ready for her when she came down, but she did it little justice. Lady O'Gara had to be content with her trying to eat. She seemed tired even after the slight exertion of dressing, but she was very eager to go to Lizzie Brennan.
"If only I knew I should find my mother I should not be so troublesome to you kind people," she said with a quivering smile, which Lady O'Gara found terribly pathetic.
She said to herself that Grace Comerford must have lacked a good deal in her relation towards Stella to have left the child so hungry for mother-love. Again there was something that puzzled her. Stella seemed to have forgotten everything except the fact of her mother's disappearance. Did she understand the facts of her birth, all that they meant to her and how the world regarded them? Or was it that these things were swallowed up in the girl's passion of love and loss?
Stella started out at a great pace, but lagged after a little while, and turned with an apology to Lady O'Gara.
"I feel as though I had had influenza," she said. "I suppose it's being in the house so much and not eating or sleeping well. Oh, I must not get ill, Lady O'Gara; for I cannot stay here unless my mother comes back…"
"I thought you liked us all, Stella," Lady O'Gara said, rather sadly.
"You seemed very happy with us always."
"That was before my mother came, before I knew that she and I belonged to each other and were only a trouble to people."
She harped on old Lizzie's phrase.
"My poor little mother!" she said. "All that time I was living in luxury my mother was working. Her poor hands are the hands of a working woman. I cannot bear to look at them."