hirty pounds to bring her
over here, and how is she to come all alone?'

Kate made no reply; she knew the danger sometimes of interrupting his own
solution of a difficulty.

'She's a big girl, I suppose, by this--fourteen or fifteen?'

'Over nineteen, papa.'

'So she is, I was forgetting. That scoundrel, her father, might come after
her; he'd have the right if he wished to enforce it, and what a scandal
he'd bring upon us all!'

'But would he care to do it? Is he not more likely to be glad to be
disembarrassed of her charge?'

'Not if he was going to sell her--not if he could convert her into money.'

'He has never been in England; he may not know how far the law would give
him any power over her.'

'Don't trust that, Kate; a blackguard always can find out how much is in
his favour everywhere. If he doesn't know it now, he'd know it the day
after he landed.' He paused an instant, and then said: 'There will be the
devil to pay with old Peter Gill, for he'll want all the cash I can scrape
together for Loughrea fair. He counts on having eighty sheep down there at
the long crofts, and a cow or two besides. That's money's worth, girl!'

Another silence followed, after which he said, 'And I think worse of the
Greek scoundrel than all the cost.'

'Somehow, I have no fear that he'll come here?'

'You'll have to talk over Peter, Kitty'--he always said Kitty when he meant
to coax her. 'He'll mind you, and at all events, you don't care about his
grumbling. Tell him it's a sudden call on me for railroad shares, or'--and
here he winked knowingly--'say, it's going to Rome the money is, and for
the Pope!'

'That's an excellent thought, papa,' said she, laughing; 'I'll certainly
tell him the money is going to Rome, and you'll write soon--you see with
what anxiety she expects your answer.'

'I'll write to-night when the house is quiet, and there's no racket
nor disturbance about me.' Now though Kearney said this with a perfect
conviction of its truth and reasonableness, it would have been very
difficult for any one to say in what that racket he spoke of consisted, or
wherein the quietude of even midnight was greater than that which prevailed
there at noonday. Never, perhaps, were lives more completely still or
monotonous than theirs. People who derive no interests from the outer
world, who know nothing of what goes on in life, gradually subside into a
condition in which reflection takes the place of conversation, and lose