"You wanted her," Mrs. Wade indicated Lady O'Gara—"for Terence's wife.
It was not likely you could have put up with me instead."
"She preferred Shawn O'Gara," said Mrs. Comerford, with a queer bitterness. "I might have turned to you who loved Terence. I had nothing against Shawn O'Gara. He loved Terence better than a brother. I meant not to lose sight of you though I forbade you ever to claim the child. You disappeared from the place where I had sent you. I did not mean you to want for anything. After all you were Terence's."
Her voice ended on a queer note of tenderness.
Suddenly Terry O'Gara spoke, coming out of his corner, the bright light on his glowing eager young face.
"Stella will not refuse to listen to me, now," he said. "You will not refuse me Stella, Mrs. Comerford?"
He addressed Mrs. Wade. The name sounded most strangely in the ears of those who heard it. The woman addressed coloured and looked at him with softly parted lips. Her eyes were suddenly dewy.
"If it had been as … as … the poor darling thought," the boy blushed vividly, averting his gaze from the face that was so like Stella's in its softness and wonder and shyness—"it would have made no difference. My mother knows. It would have made no difference. The only barrier would have been Stella herself. I was afraid of Stella's will."
"Stella must decide for herself. Thank God, she did not turn from her mother. I thought I would go away and that this tale need never be told. I knew I had been wrong to come back. I never thought any one would have had the heart to tell my child that story."
She turned suddenly accusing eyes on Mrs. Comerford.
"Even yet she does not know that I was married to her father," she went on. "But she does not shrink from me. My little daughter! That such an anguish as that should ever have come to her! She has chosen me even so before all the world!"