come that in the story of Katrine it cannot remain untold.
Sad and wide-eyed, she was sitting in her black frock, huddled close to the big pine-tree at the foot of the garden, when Barney O'Grady, the son of Nora, came out of the beech woods. He had been crying, and at sight of Katrine he threw himself on the grass, breaking into a passion of tears, and clutching at her skirt as a child might have done.
"Barney!" Katrine cried. "Barney, dear, what's your trouble?" and she put a soft hand on the boy's tousled red hair.
"Mother's going to leave me here," he said, "and I want to go. I hate it, hate it, hate it, here all alone! I want to go! I want to go!" he moaned.
"Is it the money?" Katrine asked.
"Yes," the boy answered, "there's not enough for us all. And I'm to stay with Mr. McDermott till I earn enough to come. And I want to go now."
"But if you should get in New York, what would you do?" Katrine demanded.
"Newspaper work," was the answer. "I've the gift for it," he explained, with an assured vanity, between his sobs.
She had known such lonesomeness and understood it, yet, with all the willingness in the world to help the boy, she had not one penny which she might call her own. Nora kept everything, and she reasoned if Nora had made up her mind that Barney was to stay in North Carolina the chances were heavy that there he would remain.
But the boy continued to sob appealingly, and Katrine, who had that real intelligence which no sooner sees a desired end than it finds a way to accomplish it, put her sorrow aside for practical thinking.