After this, Cosmo’s tale ended with a great success; he had excited his mother--and the truth began to glide into her unwilling heart, that Mary of Melmar was, like herself, the mother of fatherless children, a widow, and poor. She heard all the rest without a word of displeasure; she became grave, and said nothing, when her sons discussed the matter; she nodded her head approvingly when Patie repeated rather more strongly than before his satisfaction that Cosmo had found the lost Mary, since she was to be found. The Mistress was thinking of something--but it was only after she had said good night to them that the youths discovered what it was. “Bairns,” said the Mistress then, abruptly pausing upon the stair, with her candle in her hand, “that bit lassie at Melmar is in the dwelling of the enemy--and if it were not so, the mother canna make war on the house where her bairn has shelter. You’re her nearest kinsmen that I ken of, to be friends as well--she’ll have to come here.” “Mother!” cried Cosmo, in delight and surprise, and compunction, “can you ask her here?” “Ay, laddie--I can do mony things, mair than the like of you ken of,” said the Mistress; and, saying so, she went slowly up stairs, with the light in her hand, and her shadow climbing the wall after her, leaving no unkindness in the echo of her motherly good night. CHAPTER LX. During all these months Desirée had led a strange life at Melmar. She had never told any one of the revelation, painful and undesired, the miserable enlightenment which Aunt Jean’s story had brought. What Cosmo told Madame Roche months after, Madame Roche’s little daughter knew on that winter night by the Kelpie, when the tale of Aunt Jean, and all its confirming circumstances, stung her poor little heart with its first consciousness of falsehood and social treachery. After that she was ill, and they were kind to her at Melmar, and when she recovered Desirée still did not tell her mother. People did not write so many letters then as they do now, in these corresponding days--Madame Roche certainly did not hear oftener than once a fortnight, sometimes not more than once a month from her daughter, for Melmar was nearly as far from St. Ouen in _those_ days as India is now. Many a painful thought it cost poor Desirée as she stole out by herself, avoiding every one, to the side of Tyne. Oswald Huntley, after her recovery, had resumed his manner of devotion toward her--but Desirée’s eyes were no longer touched with the fairy glamour of her first dream. She had not been “in love,” though the poor child imagined she had--she had only been amused by that dream of romantic fancy to which seventeen is subject, and touched into gratitude and pleasure by the supposed love she had won--yet, even while she scorned his false pretense of tenderness, that very disdain made Desirée shrink from the thought of injuring Oswald. She was sadly troubled between the two sentiments, this poor little girl, who was French, and