"An' how do you be likin' Ameriky?" asked the pleased old man, as they walked along.
"I like Ameriky fine," answered the girl gravely. She was taller than he, though she looked so slender and so young. "I was very downhearted, too, l'avin' home and me mother, but I 'll go back to it some day, God willing, sir; I could n't die wit'out seeing me mother again. I 'm all over the place here since daybreak. I think I 'd like work best on the railway," and she turned toward him with a resolved and serious look.
"Wisha! there 's no work at all for a girl like you on the Road," said Uncle Patsy patiently. "You 've a bit to learn yet, sure; 't is the mill you mane."
"There 'll be plinty work to do. I always thought at home, when I heard the folks tarking, that I 'd get work on the railway when I 'd come to Ameriky. Yis, indeed, sir!" continued Nora earnestly. "I was looking at the mills just now, and I heard the great n'ise from them. I 'd never be afther shutting meself up in anny mill out of the good air. I 've no call to go to jail yet in thim mill walls. Perhaps there 'd be somebody working next me that I 'd never get to like, sir."
There was something so convinced and decided about these arguments that Uncle Patsy, usually the calm autocrat of his young relatives, had nothing whatever to say. Nora was gently keeping step with his slow gait. She had won his heart once for all when she called him by the old boyish name her mother used forty years before, when they played together by the Wishing Brook.
"I wonder do you know a b'y named Johnny O'Callahan?" inquired Nora presently, in a somewhat confidential tone; "a pritty b'y that's working on the railway; I seen him last night and I coming here; he ain't a guard at all, but a young fellow that minds the brakes. We stopped a long while out there; somethin' got off the rails, and he adwised wit' me, seeing I was a stranger. He said he knew you, sir."
"Oh, yes, Johnny O'Callahan. I know him well; he 's a nice b'y, too," answered Patrick Quin approvingly.
"Yis, sir, a pritty b'y," said Nora, and her color brightened for an instant, but she said no more.
II.
Mike Duffy and his wife came into the Quins' kitchen one week-day night, dressed in their Sunday clothes; they had been making a visit to their well-married daughter in Lawrence. Patrick Quin's chair was comfortably tipped back against the wall, and Bridget, who looked somewhat gloomy, was putting away the white supper-dishes.