A succession of angry childish shrieks made him suddenly wheel round, and look in the direction from which he had come. Two nurses and two children stood by the stone seats near the group of bronze figures erected to the memory of John Boyle O’Reilly.
The sergeant strolled slowly back to them. One of the nurses bent over a little girl who was sobbing violently, and was stamping her foot at a foreign-looking lad with a pale face, who stood at a little distance from her. His nurse, or attendant, for he was rather too old a child to come entirely under a nursery régime, supported him by her presence, and would have taken his hand in hers if he had not drawn it from her.
“And sure you’ve hurt her this time with your murderin’ Frenchy temper,” exclaimed the little girl’s nurse, looking away from her sobbing charge at the silent boy. “It’s a batein’ you ought to have. Come now, tell us what you were after a-doing to her?”
“He took me by the arm and the leg, and he sweeped the ground with me,” cried the little girl peeping at him from between her fingers.
“Och, the young villain,” interrupted her nurse, “and did you?”
The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, it is true; but afterwards embraced her.”
“By the soul of love, but you’re the queer boy,” responded the nurse warmly; “and it’s the likes of you makes the men that thinks they can drag us women round the earth by the hair of our heads, and then make it up with a—I’m sorry for ye, me dear—Bad luck to ye.”
“Hush now, Bridget,” interposed the second nurse, stepping nearer the boy. “Wait till you hear the rights of this. Tell us now, Master Eugene, what did Virgie do to you?”
The boy’s eyes flashed; but he said quietly enough, “Would you have me a talebearer? What would my grandfather say? Ask the child”—and he pointed to the still sobbing Virgie with as grand an air as if he were really the man that he felt himself to be.
“He h-h-hurt my pealings,” wailed Virgie dismally.