Stella’s face softened indescribably.  The memory of her child did for her what all her passion for Harry Luttrell could not do.  It restored her youth.  Her eyes grew tender, her mouth quivered, the look of conflict vanished altogether.

“We had good times together, my baby and I. I took her to the sea.  It sounds foolish, but we were more like a couple of children together than mother and daughter”; and Joan, looking at the delicate, porcelain-like figure in front of her, smiled in response.

“Yes, I can understand that.”

“She was with me every minute,” Stella Croyle resumed.  “I watched her so, I gave her so much of me that when I had seen her off at the station with her nurse at the end of the month, I was left behind, as weak and limp as an invalid.  I lived for her, Joan, believe that at all events in my favour!  There was no one else.”

“I do believe it.”

“Then one year in the winter she did not come to me.”

“They kept her back!” cried Joan.  “But you had the right to her.”

“Yes.  And I went down to Exeter to her father’s house, to fetch her away.”

It was curious that Stella Croyle, who was speaking of her own distressful life, told her story with a quiet simplicity of tone, as if she had bent her neck in submission to the hammer strokes of her destiny; whereas Joan, who was but listening to griefs of another, was stirred to a compassion which kindled her face and made her voice shake.

“Oh, they hadn’t sent her away!  She was waiting for you,” she cried eagerly.

“She was waiting for me.  Yes!  But it was no longer my baby who was waiting.  They had worked on her, Robert, my husband—­and his sisters.  They had told her—­oh, more than they need!  That I was bad.”

“Oh!” breathed Joan.

“Yes, they were a little cruel.  They had changed baby altogether.  She was just eight at that time.”  Stella stopped for a moment or two.  Her voice did not falter but her eyes suddenly swam with tears.  “She used to adore me—­she really and truly did.  Now her little face and her eyes were like flint.  And what do you think she said to me?  Just this!  ’Mummy, I don’t want to go with you.  If you take me with you, you’ll spoil my holidays!’”

Joan shot back in her chair.

“But they had taught her to say that?”

Stella Croyle shook her head.

“They had taught her to dislike me.  My little girl has character.  She wouldn’t have repeated the words, because she had been taught them.  No, she meant them.”

“But a day or two with you and she would have forgotten them.  Oh, she did forget them!”

In her great longing to comfort the woman, whose deep anguish she divined beneath the quiet desolation of her voice, Joan overleapt her own knowledge.  She was still young enough to will that past events had not occurred, and that things true were false.