She would often ask Mrs. Bentley to sit with her until bedtime, and revel in the shrewd north-country woman’s experiences, and her impressions of the new land to which love had brought her. Both women grew to have a sincere and trustful affection for each other, and one night, seven or eight months after Mrs. Denison’s death, Mrs. Bentley told a story which explained what had frequently puzzled Alice--the patient sorrow in Mrs. Denison’s eyes, and Mr. Denison’s harassed and dejected manner. “But for your goodness to the children,” said the old woman, “and the way that precious baby takes to you, I don’t think I should be willing to say what I am going to do, miss. Though my dear mistress wished it, and said, the very last night, ‘You must tell her all about it, some day, Nana,’--and I promised, to quiet her,--I don’t think I could bring myself to it if I hadn’t lived with you and known you.” And then the good nurse told her strange and moving tale. She described how her master had come out young and careless-hearted to New Zealand in the service of the government, and how scandalised and angry his father and mother, the old Tory squire and his wife, had been to receive from him, after a year or two, letters brimming with a boyish love for his “beautiful Maori princess,” whom he described as having “the sweetest heart and the loveliest eyes in the world.” It gave them little comfort to hear that her father was one of the wealthiest Maoris in the island, and that, though but half civilised himself, he had had his daughter well educated in the “bishop’s” and other English schools. To them she was a savage. There was no threat of disinheritance, for there was nothing for him to inherit. There was little money, and the estate was entailed on the elder brother. But all that could be done to intimidate him was done, and in vain. Then silence fell between the parents and the son. But one spring day came the news of a grandson, called Benjamin after his grandfather, and an urgent letter from their boy himself, enclosing a prettily and humbly worded note from the new strange daughter, begging for an English nurse. She told them that she had now no father and no mother, for they had died before the baby came, and if she might love her husband’s parents a little she would be glad.