"Ef yer don't be thtil, I'll thick my dawg on yer."
The two ladies fell back appalled.
"Turn that great animal out of doors," said Mrs. Gano, in awful tones, to the cook. But Katie O'Flynn shrank visibly from availing herself of this kind permission.
"Sure, mum, he'd have the heart out of me; and that's just what Miss Val would like, be the Howly Mother!"
"This is beyond everything," said Mrs. Gano, more nonplussed than she had often found herself. "The child must be out of her senses. We will go up to your mistress," she said to Katie O'Flynn. "If you were my daughter," she added, solemnly, looking back at the immovable one, "I should know how to deal with you. As it is, I'll leave you to your father."
But leaving Val to her father proved a less drastic measure than Mrs. Gano anticipated. Whether because of his sentiment about the first-born—offspring of that only year of happiness and hope—or merely because her wildness was a distraction in his brief moments of respite from crushing cares, at all events, he looked upon the child with a lenient eye. He had her much about him when he was at home, smiled at recitals of her escapades, and called her his amiable firebrand, never in the least realizing that the overflow of animal spirits, which in rare hours of ease were his diversion and delight, might be to others a chronic bewilderment, and a not infrequent torment.
"Her mother," said the elder Mrs. Gano, not thoroughly understanding the situation—"her mother has utterly spoiled the child."
"No, no," said John Gano, smiling. "Val was born like that. I've never known anybody with such high spirits."
"'Spirits?' Nonsense! Fever. And you, every one of you help to aggravate her unnatural activity of mind and body. Meanwhile, my advice to you is: Don't make an idol of your eldest daughter. It's bad enough in the case of a boy, but no girl survives it."