As she spoke she tried to return, and to overcome, if possible, the steady gaze of the other; but this was not an effort of which Miss Susan was capable. The strange, beautiful creature, who looked like some being of a new species treading this unaccustomed soil, looked calmly at her and smiled again. “No,” she said, “you will keep me here; that will be change, what I lofe. I will know your friends. I will be as your daughter. You will not send me back to that place where they hate me. I like this better. I will stay here, and be a daughter to you.” Miss Susan grew pale to her very lips; her sin had found her out. “You say so because you are angry,” she said, trembling; “but they are your friends; they have been kind to you. This is not really my house, but my nephew’s, and I cannot pretend to have--any right to you; though what you say is very kind,” she added, with a shiver. “I will write to M. Austin, and you will pay us a short visit, for we are dull here--and then you will go back to your home. I know you would not like the life here.” “I shall try,” said the stranger composedly. “I like a room like this, and a warm, beautiful house; and you have many servants and are rich. Ah, madame must not be too modest. She _has_ a right to me--and the child. She will be my second mother, I know it. I shall be very happy here.” Miss Susan trembled more and more. “Indeed you are deceiving yourself,” she said. “Indeed, I could not set myself against Mousheer Austin, your father-in-law. Indeed, indeed--” “And indeed, indeed!” said her visitor. “Yes; you have best right to the child. The child is yours--and I cannot be separated from him. Am not I his mother?” she said, with a mocking light on her face, and laughed--a laugh which was in reality very musical and pleasant, but which sounded to Miss Susan like the laugh of a fiend. And then there came a pause; for Miss Susan, at her wits’ end, did not know what to say. The child lay with one little foot kicked out at full length, the other dimpled knee bent, his little face flushed in the firelight, fast asleep at their feet; the wet shawl in which he had been wrapped steaming and smoking in the heat; and the tall, fine figure of the young woman, slim and graceful, thrown back in the easy-chair in absolute repose and comfort. Though Miss Susan stood on her own hearth, and these two were intruders, aliens, it was she who hesitated and trembled, and the other who was calm and full of easy good-humor. She lay back in her chair as if she had lived there all her life; she stretched herself out before the welcome fire; she smiled upon the mistress of the house with benign indifference. “You would not separate the mother and the child,” she repeated. “That would be worse than to separate husband and wife.”