"Has it come? Has it, Peg?"
She buried her face on his breast, and though no sound came, he knew by the trembling of her little body that she was crying.
So it HAD come into her life.
The child he had sent away a month ago had come back to him transformed in that little time—into a woman.
The Cry of Youth and the Call of Life had reached her heart.
CHAPTER II
LOOKING BACKWARD
That night Peg and her father faced the future. They argued out all it might mean. They would fight it together. It was a pathetic, wistful little Peg that came back to him, and O'Connell set himself the task of lifting something of the load that lay on his child's heart.
After all, he reasoned with her, with all his gentility and his advantages to have allowed Peg to like him and then to deliberately hurt her at the end, just as she was leaving, for a fancied insult, did not augur well for the character of Jerry.