xultingly. "Yes, that's the best of it--the
next best of it. It was your betting that was the best of all--the best
thing you ever did since we married, except your coming here."

"It's in time to help you, too--with your own money, isn't it?"

He glanced at his watch. "Hours--I'm hours to the good. That crowd--that
gang of thieves--that bunch of highwaymen! I've got them--got them, and
got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, too, to start again at home,
at Lammis, Mona, back on the--but no, I'm not sure that I can live there
now after this big life out here."

"I'm not so sure, either," Mona replied, with a light of larger
understanding in her eyes. "But we'll have to go back and stop the world
talking, and put things in shape before we come here to stay."

"To stay here--do you mean that?" he asked eagerly.

"Somewhere in this big land," she replied softly; "anyhow, to stay here
till I've grown up a little. I wasn't only small in body in the old
days, I was small in mind, Shiel."

"Anyhow, I've done with betting and racing, Mona. I've just got time
left--I'm only thirty-nine--to start and really do something with
myself."

"Well, start now, dear man of Lammis. What is it you have to do before
twelve o'clock to-night?" "What is it? Why, I have to pay over two
thousand of this,"--he flourished the banknotes--"and even then I'll
still have two thousand left. But wait--wait. There was the original
fifty pounds. Where is that fifty pounds, little girl alive? Out with
it. This is the profit. Where is the fifty you staked?" His voice was
gay with raillery.

She could look him in the face now and prevaricate without any shame or
compunction at all. "That fifty pounds--that! Why, I used it to buy my
ticket for Canada. My husband ought to pay my expenses out to him."

He laughed greatly. All Ireland was rioting in his veins now. He had
no logic or reasoning left. "Well, that's the way to get into your old
man's heart, Mona. To think of that! I call it tact divine. Everything
has spun my way at last. I was right about that Derby, after all. It was
in my bones that I'd make a pot out of it, but I thought I had lost it
all when Flamingo went down."

"You never know your luck--you used to say that, Shiel."

"I say it again. Come, we must tell our friends--Kitty, her mother, and
the Young Doctor. You don't know what good friends they have been to me,
mavourneen."

"Yes, I think I do," said Mona, opening the door to t