And no coaxing would make her carry on the discussion or consider its possibility.
It still harassed him to think he had so little to leave her if anything happened to him. The offer to go to America seemed providential. Her mother was buried there. He would take Peg to her grave.
Peg grew very thoughtful at the idea of leaving Ireland. All her little likes and dislikes—her impulsive affections and hot hatreds were all bound up in that country. She dreaded the prospect of meeting a number of new people.
Still it was for her father's good, so she turned a brave face to it and said:
"Sure it is the finest thing in the wurrld for both of us."
But the night before they left Ireland she sat by the little window in her bed-room until daylight looking back through all the years of her short life.
It seemed as if she were cutting off all that beautiful golden period. She would never again know the free, careless, happy-go-lucky, living-from-day-to-day existence, that she had loved so much.
It was a pale, wistful, tired little Peg that joined her father at breakfast next morning.
His heart was heavy, too. But he laughed and joked and sang and said how glad they ought to be—going to that wonderful new country, and by the way the country Peg was born in, too! And then he laughed again and said how FINE SHE looked and how WELL HE felt and that it seemed as if it were God's hand in it all. And Peg pretended to cheer up, and they acted their parts right to the end—until the last line of land disappeared and they were headed for America. Then they separated and went to their little cabins to think of all that had been. And every day they kept up the little deception with each other until they reached America.
They were cheerless days at first for O'Connell. Everything reminded him of his first landing twenty years before with his young wife—both so full of hope, with the future stretching out like some wonderful panorama before them. He returns twenty years older to begin the fight again—this time for his daughter.