each
other which one we should take an' we couldn't make up our minds an' I
left it to you an' ye picked a road an' it brought us out safe and
thrue at the spot we were making for? Do you remember it, Peg?"

"Faith I do, father. I remember it well. Ye called me yer little guide
and said ye'd follow my road the rest of yer life. An' it's many's the
laugh we had when I'd take ye wrong sometimes afterwards." She paused.
"What makes ye think of that just now, father?"

He did not answer.

"Is it on account o' that letther?" she persisted.

"It is, Peg." He spoke with difficulty as if the words hurt him to
speak. "We've got to a great big crossin'-place again where the roads
branch off an' I don't know which one to take."

"Are ye goin' to lave it to me again, father?" said Peg.

"That's what I can't make up me mind about, dear--for it may be that
ye'll go down one road and me down the other."

"No, father," Peg cried passionately, "that we won't. Whatever the road
we'll thravel it together."

"I'll think it out by meself, Peg. Lave me for a while--alone. I want
to think it out by meself--alone."

"If it's separation ye're thinkin' of, make up yer mind to one
thing--that I'LL never lave YOU. Never."

"Take 'MICHAEL' out for a spell and come back in half an hour and in
the meanwhile I'll bate it all out in me mind."

She bent down and straightened the furrows in his forehead with the
tips of her fingers, and kissed him and then whistled to the wistful
"MICHAEL" and together they went running down the street toward the
little patch of green where the children played, and amongst whom
"MICHAEL" was a prime favourite.

Sitting, his head in his hands, his eyes staring into the past,
O'Connell was facing the second great tragedy of his life.

CHAPTER II

WE MEET AN OLD FRIEND AFTER MANY YEARS

While O'Connell sat there in that little room in New York trying to
decide Peg's fate, a man, who had played some considerable part in
O'Connell's life, lay, in a splendidly furnished room in a mansion in
the West End of London--dying.

Nathaniel Kingsnorth's twenty years of loneliness and desolation were
coming to an end. What an empty, arid stretch of time those years
seemed to him as he feebly looked back on them!

After the tragedy of his sister's reckless marriage he deserted public
life entirely and shut himself away in his country-house--except for a
few weeks in London occasionally when his presence was