‘It will take fifty—no, not fifty, but five-and-thirty 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.’