The girl's face, so sweet and so pensive, wrought strongly upon the older woman's sympathy. Something of her own girlhood came back to her. Being freed from the town and all its associations, she became more considerate, more thoughtful. She wished to speak, and yet she found it very hard to begin. At last she said, with a touch of mockery in her tone: "You like Ross Cavanagh almost as well as I do myself, don't you?" The girl flushed a little, but her eyes remained steady. "I would not be here if I did not," she replied. "Neither would I. Well, now, I have got something to tell you--something I ought to have told you long ago--something that Ross ought to know. I intended to tell you that first day you came back, but I couldn't somehow get to it, and I kept putting it off and putting it off till--well, then I got fond of you, and every day made it harder." Here she made her supreme effort. "Child, I'm an old bluff. I'm not your mother at all." Lee stared at her in amazement. "What do you mean?" she asked. "I mean your real mother died when you was a tiny little babe. You see, I was your father's second wife; in fact, you weren't a year old when we married. Ed made me promise never to let you know. We were to bring you up just the same as if you was a child to both of us. Nobody knows but Reddy. I told him the day we started up here." The girl's mind ran swiftly over the past as she listened. The truth of the revelation reached her instantly, explaining a hundred strange things which had puzzled her all her life. The absence of deep affection between herself and Lize was explained. Their difference in habit, temperament, thought--all became plain. "But my mother!" she said, at last. "Who _was_ my mother?" "I never saw her. You see, Ed came into the country bringing you, a little motherless babe. He always said your mother was a fine woman, but I never so much as saw a picture of her. She was an educated woman, he said--a Southern woman--and her name was Virginia, but that's about all I can tell you of her. Now, I am going to let Ross know all of this as soon as I can. It will make a whole lot of difference in what he thinks of you." She uttered all this much as a man would have done, with steady voice and with bright eyes, but Lee Virginia could feel beneath her harsh inflections the deep emotion which vibrated there, and her heart went out toward the lonely woman in a new rush of tenderness. Now that she was released from the necessity of excusing her mother's faults--faults she could now ignore; now that she could look upon her as a loyal friend, she was moved to pity and to love, and, rising, she went to her and put her arm about her neck, and said: "This won't make any difference. I am going to stay with you and help you just the same."