"Wilful I know you are as a mountain torrent," Niall answered with a smile; "but there are some who might take you away against your will and with none to say them nay."
"I wish you would not talk so!" Winifred said petulantly, tearing to pieces with her slender, delicate fingers a daisy which she had picked up from the grass. She threw the stalk away impatiently. "There!" she cried. "By your foolish talk you have made me destroy one of my own little daisies; and I always think of them as little children playing in the long grass, hiding from one another, letting the wind blow them about, and loving the sun, as all children do."
The strange man gazed thoughtfully at her as she spoke.
"The same old fancies!" he muttered; "the same turn of mind! But I think the country people are right: she's too wise. She has an old head on young shoulders; too old a head for a child."
It was Winifred's turn to stare at Niall.
"Why are you talking to yourself like that?" she asked. "It isn't polite."
But the old man, who had been suddenly seized with a new idea, clasped his hands as if in desperate anxiety, and bent toward the child, crying:
"You didn't tell her, daughter of the O'Byrnes—you didn't tell her? Oh, say you didn't! For that would mean ruin—utter, blank ruin."
Winifred looked at him with a flash of scorn that darkened her blue eyes into black,—a look of lofty indignation which struck me forcibly.