“Ah thin, there’s never no sayin’,” replied Peggy, and with these ambiguous words she walked as far as the door. There she stood and pondered for a minute, presently she came back. “Uncle Paul.”
“Yes, little child.”
“How long do ye think I’ll be gettin’ ready to read the letter of me own father, what’s lyin’ in his cold grave?”
“That depends on yourself. When you are, in my opinion, fit to read the letter, it will be given to you.”
“I’ll have a good thry,” said Peggy. “Kiss me, Uncle Paul.”
He did kiss her very tenderly. He looked into her wonderful, luminous eyes, and there came back to him a memory of his boyhood, and Peter Desmond, the merriest, cheeriest, jolliest boy in the public school where they had both been educated.
“There’s nothing I would not do for that poor little thing,” he said to himself; “and if there is any one in the world who can help me it is Mary Welsh.”
CHAPTER VII.
MARY WELSH TO THE RESCUE.
The Welsh family lived about twelve miles away from the Wyndhams. Mr. Welsh was a clergyman, with a very large country parish, and Mary was his eldest daughter. He was an Irishman by birth, and Mary had lived in Ireland, in the County Kerry, until she was seventeen years of age. She, therefore, adored Irish people; and when, after the death of an aunt, she was obliged to return to England, she loved to tell her brothers and sisters stories of the life she led in the old country, and fired their hearts with accounts of the kindly hearted peasants, of the bogs, of the flowers, the mosses, the ferns—the marvellous things that grew in Ireland and Ireland alone.
“Sure,” cried Irish Mary—or Irish Molly, as the other children chose to call her—“it’s just the Star of the Ocean, the Pearl of the Sea!” The others, all brought up in England, could not share Mary’s enthusiasm, but they could adore Mary for herself.