"It would have been rather a farce if I had been," Eleanor retorted, "for I have an idea that you know very much more than I do; not that that would be difficult, for I know nothing. Listen, now, and I will tell you all about myself. I am Irish. My father died when I was four, and two years later my mother married again." "Oh!" said Margaret, with intense interest and sympathy in her voice; "and then they cast you adrift to earn your own living?" "No," said Eleanor, with some amusement in her voice, "they did nothing of the sort. Besides, you can't very well cast a small person of six adrift, as you call it, to earn her own living. On the contrary, my stepfather was as kind to me as if I had been his own child, and I could not have loved him more if he had been my own father whom I scarcely remember. We were so happy together, we three. My stepfather just adored my mother, she worshipped him, and they both spoiled and petted me. My stepfather was a very rich man. He was English, I must tell you, but he had come to Ireland on a visit, and there it was he met my mother; and to please her when they were married he bought a lovely estate in Kerry, which was her county, and became an Irishman, as he used to say. Until I was fifteen I did exactly as I liked all day. I rode, of course, and hunted, and lived an outdoor life, and though I had a governess and was supposed to do lessons occasionally, it was only very occasionally that I showed my nose in the schoolroom. And then, when I was fifteen, our happy life came to an end. One morning my stepfather got a letter at breakfast to say that the solicitor who had charge of all his money had committed suicide two or three days before, and that it had been found that he had made away with huge sums belonging to his clients. We were absolutely ruined. "The news was such an awful shock to my stepfather that it brought on an attack of the heart, to which he was subject, and he died that night; and my mother died a few weeks later. She could not, she told me, face life without him, and she pined away and died simply of a broken heart." Eleanor's voice had become rather husky as she spoke the last few sentences, but she did not cry, she only sat and stared rather fixedly at the various timetables with which the table was strewn. Margaret put out her hand and touched her timidly on the arm, and the silent token of sympathy pleased Eleanor who could not have borne her to have spoken just then. There was a moment or two of silence, during which the rain splashed steadily, drearily against the dusty window panes. It had settled now into a thoroughly wet afternoon, and there seemed very little prospect of its clearing before nightfall.