uppose 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."

"I did not dare come near Killesky, though I knew that trouble had
altered me. I came to Drumlisk on the other side of the mountain. You
had been generous, Mrs. Comerford, and my grandmother had saved money
and I wanted for nothing. I lived in a little cottage there and I
nursed the poor. Father Anthony O'Connell, the priest there, was very
good to me. He is a dear old saint. He had a terrible woman for
housekeeper. She had a wicked tongue, and she persecuted him with her
tantrums, and half-starved him because she was too lazy to cook for him
or get up in the morning to keep his house. He used to say--'Ah well,
she doesn't drink!' He'd find some good in the worst. He wouldn't get
rid of her, but at last she got rid of herself. She went off to look
after a distant cousin, who was old and