For fifteen years this strange old creature and her boy Barney had followed the seesawing fortunes of the Dulanys, accompanying their gypsy-like sojournings with great loyalty and joyousness.

She rose from her spinning as Ravenel approached.

“Is Miss Katrine at home?” he inquired.

Nora dropped a courtesy, and with the tail of her eye observed, labelled, and docketed Francis Ravenel.

“Will your lordship be seated,” she said.  “Miss Katrine will be back in a minute.  She’s gone to ask after Miranda’s baby.  Nothin’ seems able to stop her from regardin’ the naygurs as human beings.  If ’twere not that I know she’d be here immejit I’d go afther her mysel’, and not keep your lordship waitin’.”

She motioned him to a wide settle on the porch with an alert hospitality.  In her heart she preferred Dermott McDermott to all possible suitors for Katrine, but if this was another jo, as the Scotch say, so much the better, for one might urge the other on, she thought, with primitive sagacity.

“Would ye have a drop of Scotch?” she asked, and upon Francis declining she reseated herself at her wheel, “with his permission,” as she put it, delighted, Celtlike, at the chance for conversation.  “Ye’re perhaps,” she says, with some humor, “like the man in the old, old tale when a friend asked him to take a drink.  He said he couldn’t for three reasons.  First, he’d promised his mother he never would drink; second, his doctor had tould him he mustn’t drink; and, third, he’d just had a drink.”

Frank laughed back at the merry old woman as she sat at the whirring wheel, her accustomed eyes scarcely glancing at the work in her scrutiny of him.

“Dulany’s not at home this day.  I’m sorry,” she went on.  “He’s off about the sawmill of that triflin’ Shehan man.  Did ye hear that about his telegraph, Mr. Ravenel?  No?  It’s a funny tale.  Ye know that old mill of yours ain’t worth more than a few hunder dollars.  But Dulany saw an advertisement for a new kind of machinery, and he wrote the firm to ask them what it would cost to have it put in.  They sint back the word:  tin thousand dollars, and would he plaze lit thim know immejit if it was wanted.  He didn’t wait to write.  He telegraphed: 

     “’If a man had ten thousand dollars, what in hell would he want
     with a sawmill?’”

Frank laughed aloud again, uncomprehending the fact that the shrewd little woman was deliberately holding him with her tales till Katrine returned.

Inside the house he heard a note, struck suddenly, and repeated over and over in a voice little above a whisper.

“She’s come in the other way.  I’ll tell her your lordship’s wantin’ her,” said Nora O’Grady, disappearing.

He looked about him in great content.  Things seemed so much as he desired them to be—­the roses, the old furniture, the spinning-wheel, the coiffed peasant woman—­that he waited for Katrine’s coming, fearing that she should be less beautiful than he remembered her.