She said, very gently: "I understand. For I loved Stella too. And that is why the room is never really lighted when you come. Oh, you stupid man, how could I have _helped_ knowing it--that all the love you have made to me was because you have been playing I was Stella? That knowledge has preserved me, more than once, my child, from succumbing to your illicit advances in this dead Lichfield." And I was really astonished, for she was not by ordinary the sort of woman who consents to be a makeshift. I said as much, "And it _has_ been a comfort, Lizzie, because she doesn't come as often now, for some reason--" "Why--what do you mean?" The room was very dark, lit only by the steady, comfortable glow of a soft-coal fire. For it was a little after sunset, and outside, carriages were already rumbling down Regis Avenue, and people were returning from the afternoon drive. I could not see anything distinctly, excepting my own hands, which were like gold in the firelight; and so I told her all about _The Indulgences of Ole-Luk-Ole_. "She came, that first time, over the crest of a tiny upland that lay in some great forest,--Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn, for the grass was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first thought, as I now remember, was how in the dickens could any mediaeval lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a woman of the Middle Ages. "Only her features were those of Stella, and the eyes of this woman were filled with an unutterable happiness and fear, as she came toward me,--just as the haunting eyes of Stella were upon the night she married Peter Blagden, and I babbled nonsense to the moon. "'Oh, I have wanted you,--I have wanted you!' she said; and afterward, unarithmeticably dimpling, just as she used to do, you may remember: _'Depardieux,_ messire! have you then forgotten that upon this forenoon we hunt the great boar?" "'Stella!' I said, 'O dear, dear Stella! what does it mean?' "'You silly! it means, of course, that Ole-Luk-Oie is kind, and has put us both into the glaze of the mustard-jar--only I wonder which one we have gotten into?' Stella said. 'Don't you remember them, dear--the blue mustard-jar and the red one your Mammy had that summer at the Green Chalybeate, with men on them hunting a boar?' "'They stood, one on each corner of the mantelpiece,' I said; 'and in the blue one she kept matches, and in the other--' "'She kept buttons in the red one,' said Stella,--'big, shiny white buttons, with four holes in them, that had come off your underclothes, and were to be sewed on again. One day you swallowed one of 'em, I remember, because you _would_ keep it in your mouth while you swung in the hammock. And you thought it would surely kill you, so you knelt down in the dry leaves and prayed God He wouldn't let it kill you.'