“I’m afraid I am keeping you from your friends. So I’m to look elsewhere for a nurse for Captain O’Leary?”
“Why don’t you try Mrs. Darlington?” she inquired. Then with a nod, she went back to her playmates.
An hour or so later a group of people, Mrs. Darlington among them, took a near-by table for tea. Major O’Dell and Captain O’Leary, the latter looking very white, came out and joined them. They did not look in her direction until she heard Mrs. Darlington remark:
“Larry, just see what a collection of little boys your ugly duckling has made.”
At this they all looked. Isabelle glanced at her little boys, and said something that made them shout with laughter. But it was not so loud but that the wind carried her his reply:
“She’s not my ugly duckling. She’s a wicked little leprechaun, born under a mushroom, on a black night, but she swims like a fish, and dances like a pixie. I tell ye she’s not human at all at all!”
She heard their laughter, and her eyes smarted. What a fool he had made of her! How she despised herself. There was only one way to square it, to get back her self-respect. She would find out what a leprechaun meant, and she would bedevil the honourable Captain O’Leary, like the pixie that he named her!