“Oh, Margery, Margery! not yet—not yet! Spare me a little longer. I have been so tried and worried. I am not quite right in my head; wait awhile before you come, dear Margery.” There was a world of pathos in those two words—“dear Margery”—pathos and pleading both, as if the mother were asking mercy from her child. And Margery recognized the meaning, but her heart did not soften or relent. Indeed, she could not understand herself, or define the strange feeling which had taken possession of her and was urging her on to know what it was her mother had hidden so long and so successfully. But she did not then go up; she waited awhile, and going to the kitchen, prepared a tempting dinner, which she arranged upon a tray, and then took to the room, where Mrs. La Rue still sat just as Reinette had left her, her face as white as marble, her eyes blood-shot and dim, and her whole attitude that of a guilty culprit awaiting its punishment. And she was awaiting hers, and when the first blow came in the person of Margery bringing her the nicely-prepared dinner, she seemed to shrivel up in her chair, and her head dropped upon her breast. But she did not speak, and when Margery drew a little table to her side, and placing the tray upon it, poured out her tea and held it to her lips, she swallowed it mechanically, as she did the food pressed upon her. At last, however, she could take no more, and putting up her hand, she made a gesture of dissent, and whispered faintly: “Enough!” How sick and old, and crushed she looked! But for this Margery would not spare her; and when, after taking the dinner away, she returned to her mother, and sat down where Queenie had sat, she said: “Now, tell me.” “Tell you what?” Mrs. La Rue asked, and Margery replied. “Tell me the whole truth, every word of it, as you did not tell it to Queenie.” “What did I tell her?” Mrs. La Rue said, in a bewildered kind of way, as if the events of the last few hours were really a blank to her. “You told her you were Christine Bodine, her former nurse,” Margery began, and her mother interrupted her with: “And I am, Margery; that was the truth. I was Christine Marie La Mille Bodine; but I dropped the first name and the last, and for years was only Marie La Mille.” “Yes, I know,” Margery returned. “You deceived me with regard to your name, and you kept your identity a secret from Reinette when you knew how much she wished to find you, and you gave her as a reason that you feared lest she would think less of me if she knew I was the child of one who had once served her mother.” “Yes, that’s it—that’s it, Margie!” Mrs. La Rue gasped, as she clutched the skirt of Margery’s gown and rubbed it caressingly. “Mother,” Margery said, and her voice was low and stern, “that excuse might do for Queenie, but not for me, who knows all our past life. There is something you are keeping from me, and which I must know. What is it? Why were you afraid to let Queenie know who you were?”