And Peggy, suppressing that part of her narrative that related to the army, told him how she had been taken to New York, of the shipwreck, and about her efforts to reach her home.
“And so Colonel Owen of the Welsh Fusileers is your cousin,” he mused. “Methought that I had seen you somewhere, and now I know that it must have been at his house. Would you like to stay with your cousin and his daughter until I decide upon your punishment?”
“Thee did not understand, I fear me,” she exclaimed with a startled glance. “I could not stay with them because they were lost at sea. Does thee not remember that I said they were on the ‘Falcon’?”
“True; but you could not see for the fog what happened after you left in the small boat. They were rescued by another schooner, the ‘Rose,’ which I was on myself. We escaped serious injury in the storm, and came across the ‘Falcon’ just in time to rescue the crew and skipper, and those officers and others who happened to be aboard.”
For a short time Peggy was so overcome that she could not speak, but at last she murmured faintly:
“Oh, I am glad, glad!”
“What sort of girl are you,” he asked abruptly, “that you rejoice over their rescue? They were unkind to you, by your own telling. Why should you feel joy that they are living?”
“They are my kinspeople,” she said. “And sometimes they were kind. Had it not been for Harriet I would not have been in the little boat. She made me enter it when to remain on the ‘Falcon’ seemed certain death. She knew not that they would be rescued.”
“Perhaps not,” he remarked dryly. “Although I have never known Mistress Harriet Owen to do one act that had not an underlying motive. But I should not speak so to one who sees no wrong in others.”
“Don’t,” she uttered the tears springing to her eyes at the sneer. “I do see wrong; and thee doesn’t know how hard I am trying not to feel bitter toward them. I dare not think that ’tis to them I owe not seeing my mother for so long. I—I am not very good,” she faltered, “and thee knows by that wound how I am failing in living up to my teaching.”