"Well, you see, in that time a little girl gets hungry."
"Good gracious! Sakes alive! Don't they give you enough to eat?"
"Oh, yes," said Maureen; "lashins and lavins. But it isn't that hunger. It's here——" She put her little white hand against her heart. "I'm hungry for Uncle Pat, and for darling Dominic, and for Denis and Kitty. When may I see them?"
"That's what I have come to you about, acushla. You see, it is this way: You had a good bit of serious illness—you're as right as a trivet now, but it might have been the other way round. Well, things happened that we needn't talk about, and your Uncle Pat wouldn't leave the house—not he, blessed man!—while you were in any sort of danger; but when all the danger was past (and I tell you, alanna, we did have one night of it)—when it was past and over and you were quite on the mend, the doctors who were looking after you took a good haul of him. My word, didn't they pull him about. Sounding him here and patting him there—they were great men, these doctors—and they said that if your Uncle Pat went off immediately to Egypt for the winter—why, he might get well or very nearly quite well. So, Maureen, you must forgive me; but I made him go, and there is a curate at Templemore; and as he couldn't go alone, Dominic went with him, and Denis and Kitty are both at boarding-school—not the school they used to go to, but a first-rate one in no less a place than old England; and I says to myself, says I, 'I can't have those bouncing brats back for the holidays; they'll be too much for Maureen.'"
"They wouldn't," murmured Maureen, but her voice was very low, and her eyes were really now full of tears, for she was too weak to keep them back. "They are not bouncing brats, Colonel; they are darlings!"
"Well, well, child, they may be so to you; but you see I'm an old bachelor and I have my notions. So it was arranged that the pair of them should stay at school for the Christmas holidays, and for that matter for Easter as well; and the long and short of it is this, Maureen, that you have to put up with the old Colonel until the warm weather comes and your Uncle returns. For when he finds Egypt too hot, he is ordered by the doctors to go to different parts of Switzerland, and the news of him is just of the very best. I have a letter in my pocket for you, Maureen, written by himself with orders that I should give it to you on Christmas Day if it was suitable."
"Is this Christmas Day?" cried Maureen.
"Why, yes, baby; have you forgotten everything? I wanted to bring you up some plum-pudding, but Nurse Cecilia wouldn't allow it. She's something of a tyrant is that woman, though she's a first-rate nurse."
"Indeed, she is; and so is Nurse Nora," said the child. "Oh, have I indeed forgotten so much, and has the time gone by at such a rate—and aren't you—aren't you sick of me, dear Colonel?"
"Well, this is about the tune of the thing," said Colonel Herbert: "I have taken a sort of fancy to you! Oh, there, child, for the Lord's sake! What are you doing?" For Maureen had slipped off her couch and had twined her weak little arms round the Colonel's neck, and given the confirmed old bachelor the first kiss he had ever received since his mother died.