When Peggy Desmond found, as she expressed it, “all the world set agen me,” she shed no more tears. A look of proud resignation passed over her face, and she went up to her attic, where she had always slept the healthy sleep of a child who knew neither care nor sorrow, and packed her few belongings in a shabby little black trunk which her father had bought for her peasant mother to use during their brief honeymoon. How little there was to put into the trunk, but how precious that little was to Peggy! They were mostly tokens from the neighbours, who came flying from every direction to see the colleen and to wish her God speed. Her own little wardrobe was of the scantiest: two blue cotton frocks for week-days, and a rough, coarse serge for Sundays; a shabby little hat, trimmed with a piece of faded blue ribbon, which she never put on her curly head except when she went to church to listen to “his riverance” preach. “Sure thin,” she used to whisper to herself, “I’d a sight rayther be goin’ to Mass with Mammy and Daddy O’Flynn.” But the old people were very strict. Captain Desmond wished his daughter to be brought up a Protestant, and a Protestant she should be. Peggy, however, refused point-blank to attend Sunday school; but once every Sunday she went to church, and she received a certain amount of tuition on week-days at the board school until she was fourteen years of age, when her education was supposed to be complete. She was a clever little girl, and could read well, write well, and spell correctly; she also knew her “tables,” as she expressed it, “an’ sure, what did a body want more in the figurin’ line?” She was taught by the nuns of the convent near her home, however, to make exquisite crochet lace, wonderfully like real lace, and this she used to sell for the benefit of her adopted father and mother. Yes, her simple life was truly happy, she loved every one and every one loved her; she was exceedingly pretty, and when she was older would be beautiful. But now what a cruel and torturing fate had overtaken her!
But if pretty little Peggy Desmond shed passionate tears in her corner of the first-class carriage, where Wyndham had placed her, there surely were few men in the length and breadth of Ireland more perplexed than he. With all his wildest ideas he had never dreamt of bringing a creature like Peggy Desmond into his stately home. Her appearance, her dress, her accent, her absolute and complete ignorance of even the rudiments of refined life, appalled him. He could bear these things for the sake of his dead friend; but what would his wife say? Already she was angry at the intrusion of the girl into their midst, but then she had not yet seen the girl. When she did! Poor Wyndham felt his heart beat fast. What was to be done? How was he to train this poor little creature? Was she, during their journey, to receive the first rudiments of education, the first rudiments of introduction into that state of life which, as her father’s daughter, she inherited?
After weeping till she could weep no longer, the child fell into a heavy sleep, and the train was reaching Dublin when she awoke with a violent start and a cry of “Oh wurra, wurra me! wherever be I, at all, at all?”
She looked with terror across the carriage at Wyndham, who now thought the time had come to take a place near her and hold her hand. “Peggy,” he said.
“Yes, sor—yer mightiness, I mane.”
“Don’t call me that, Peggy. Peggy dear, listen. Listen hard, I want to explain things to you.”
She fixed her lovely eyes on his face. Until she opened her lips—and yet, even then, her brogue was soft and winsome—how beautiful and refined was her charming little face!
“Peggy, my child, I was your father’s greatest friend.”
“Were ye then? Bedad then, I don’t care.”
“But you ought to care, Peggy.”