ched back through the years, and once again
Angela was beside him.

Peg saw the look and knew it. She kept quite still. Then, as of old,
when her father was in trouble, she did as she was wont in those
old-young days--she slipped her little hand into his and waited for him
to break the silence.

After a while he stood up.

"Ye'd betther be goin' to bed, Peg."

"All right, father."

She went to the door. Then she stopped.

"Ye're glad I'm home, father?"

He pressed her closely to him for answer.

"I'll never lave ye again," she whispered.

All through the night Peg lay awake, searching through the past and
trying to pierce through the future.

Toward morning she slept and, in a whirling dream she saw a body
floating down a stream. She stretched out her hand to grasp it when the
eyes met hers, and the eyes were those of a dead man--and the man was
Jerry.

She woke trembling with fear and she turned on the light and huddled
into a chair and sat chattering with terror until she heard her father
moving in his room. She went to the door and asked him to let her go in
to him. He opened the door and saw his little Peg wild eyed, pale and
terror-stricken, standing on the threshold. The look in her eyes
terrified him.

"What is it, Peg, me darlin'? What is it?"

She crept in, and looked up into his face with her startling gaze, and
she grasped him with both of her small hands, and in a voice dull and
hopeless, cried despairingly:

"I dreamt he was dead! Dead! and I couldn't rache him. An' he went on
past me--down the stream--with his face up-turned--" The grasp
loosened, and just as she slipped from him, O'Connell caught her in his
strong arms and placed her gently on the sofa and tended her until her
eyes opened again and looked up at him.

It was the first time his Peg had fainted.

She had indeed come back to him changed.

He reproached himself bitterly.

Why had he insisted on her going?

She had a sorrow at her heart, now, that no hand could heal--not even
his.

Time only could soften her grief--time--and--

CHAPTER III

AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

Those first days following Peg's return found father and child nearer
each other than they had been since that famous trip through Ireland,
when he lectured from the back of his historical cart.

She became O'Connell's amanuensis. During the day she would go from
library to library in New York, verifying data for her father's
monumental work.