“Last night,” said Kathleen, taking her sister’s hand, and looking into her blue eyes while her own grew big and dark, “when I was driving the little cow home across the bog, who should I meet under the old oak tree but Granny Connor herself.
“I picked a bit of shamrock and held it tight in my hand, but she stopped me and made me talk to her, and she told me that it is our own father, himself, that has a purse from the leprecaun.”
“I’ll not believe it,” said her sister quickly. “If he had, he’d not be making shoes all day by himself.”
But Kathleen shook her head. “Granny Connor told me,” she confided, “that he has made a bargain with the fairy dwarf, and must make shoes all day long, or go wandering over the mountains a-tinkerin’.”
“What’s that you’re saying, Kathleen?” a voice behind them asked suddenly, and the children jumped up in surprise.
A man with a leather apron tied round his waist was standing beside the stone slab. It was hard to tell where he had come from so quickly, for there had been no sign of any one near when Kathleen climbed to the top of the hill.
“It is the father himself,” said Mary Ellen.
The shoemaker seated himself on the big stone and drew his little daughters down beside him; but it was such an unusual thing for him to spare any time from his work that they sat awkwardly within the shelter of his arms, waiting for him to speak.
Kathleen wondered how much of their talk he had heard, and whether he would scold her for listening to old Granny Connor, and repeating the tales to her little sister. She hung her head in silence, and Mary Ellen felt as if the sunshine had been darkened by a cloud; but the father’s arms were around both little girls to hold them, although he did not speak for some time.
“So you have been listening to old Granny Connor,” he said at last.