She lifted her head proudly as she said it. Then her expression softened as she saw the shadow on Terry O'Gara's candid face.
"Give her time," she said. "If your father and mother will not mind her being my daughter—why—I think you should ask her."
"Where have you been hiding yourself all this time?" Mrs. Comerford asked, with a certain roughness. "If I had known where you were I might have extracted this story from you earlier. I suppose it is true. How I have suffered by your folly! Do you know that I have had hard thoughts of my dead son—that he disgraced me?"
"He thought you would call his marriage disgrace."
"He wronged me there. It would have been a bitter pill, but I'd have got over it. To think of all those years during which I believed that my one son had betrayed a girl and left her to suffer the shame."
"You should not have thought it; you were his mother," Mrs. Wade, or Mrs. Comerford, said simply. Then she settled down as to a story-telling.
"My grandmother kept her word to you, Mrs. Comerford," she said. "You told her I was not to come back. She did not live very long after we left Killesky. We had reached Liverpool on our way to America, and she became ill there. She was very old and she had gipsy blood. She thought I had disgraced her. Even then I kept my oath to Terence, till almost the very end when she was dying—I thought he would forgive—I whispered in her ear that I was married. She died happy because of that word."
"What folly it was! What cruel folly!" the other woman said, as though she were in pain.
"I came back again," Mrs. Wade went on, "after some years. I did go to America, but the homesickness was terrible. It was bad enough wanting the child, but wanting the country was a separate pain. It was like a wolf in my heart. I used to look at an Irish face in the street and wonder if the man or woman suffered as I did. I believe that if I had had Stella I should have still suffered as much, or nearly as much."
"I know," Mrs. Comerford said. "It was not as bad with me, but I had to come back."