w you'll sit in judgment on
the dead and gone days of yer youth--an' in judgment on me--"

She interrupted him violently:

"What are ye sayin' to me at all! _I_ sit in judgment on YOU! What do
ye think I've become? Let me tell ye I've come back to ye a thousand
times more yer child than I was when I left ye. What I've gone through
has only strengthened me love for ye and me reverence for yer life's
work. _I_ MAY have changed. But don't we all change day by day, even as
we pass them close to each other. An' if the change is for the betther,
where's the harm? I HAVE changed, father. There's somethin' wakened in
me I never knew before. It's a WOMAN I've brought ye back instead o'
the GIRL I left. An' it's the WOMAN'LL stand by ye, father, even as the
child did when I depended on ye for every little thing. There's no
power in the wurrld'll ever separate us!"

She clung to him hysterically.

Even while she protested the most, he felt the strange new note in her
life. He held her firmly and looked into her eyes.

"There's one thing, Peg, that must part us, some day, when it comes to
you."

"What's that, father?"

"LOVE, Peg."

She lowered her eyes and said nothing.

"Has it come? Has it, Peg?"

She buried her face on his breast, and though no sound came, he knew by
the trembling of her little body that she was crying.

So it HAD come into her life.

The child he had sent away a month ago had come back to him transformed
in that little time--into a woman.

The Cry of Youth and the Call of Life had reached her heart.

CHAPTER II

LOOKING BACKWARD

That night Peg and her father faced the future. They argued out all it
might mean. They would fight it together. It was a pathetic, wistful
little Peg that came back to him, and O'Connell set himself the task of
lifting something of the load that lay on his child's heart.

After all, he reasoned with her, with all his gentility and his
advantages to have allowed Peg to like him and then to deliberately
hurt her at the end, just as she was leaving, for a fancied insult, did
not augur well for the character of Jerry.

He tried to laugh her out of her mood.

He chided her for joking with an Englishman at a critical moment such
as their leave-taking.

"And it WAS a joke, Peg, wasn't it?"

"Sure, it was, father."

"You ought to have known betther than that. During all that long month
ye were there did ye meet one Englishman that ever saw a joke?"

"N