May I go to you?
I would beg my way on foot if I only knew that at the last your heart and your door would be open to me, and as I fell at your feet, knew that I was saved.' Until a few days ago, she said, she had by her some little trinkets her mother had left her, and on which she counted as a means of escape, but her father had discovered them and taken them from her.
'If you answer this--and oh! let me not doubt you will--write to me to the care of the Signori Cayani and Battistella, bankers, Rome.

Do not delay, but remember that I am friendless, and but for this chance hopeless .-- Your niece, 'NINA KOSTALERGI.' While Kearney gave this letter to his daughter to read, he walked up and down the room with his head bent and his hands deep in his pockets.
'I think I know the answer you'll send to this, papa,' said the girl, looking up at him with a glow of pride and affection in her face.

'I do not need that you should say it.' 'It will take fifty--no, not fifty, but five-and-thirty pounds to bring her over here, and how is she to come all alone ?' Kate made no reply; she knew the danger sometimes of interrupting his own solution of a difficulty.
'She's a big girl, I suppose, by this--fourteen or fifteen ?' 'Over nineteen, papa.' 'So she is, I was forgetting.

That scoundrel, her father, might come after her; he'd have the right if he wished to enforce it, and what a scandal he'd bring upon us all!' 'But would he care to do it?
Is he not more likely to be glad to be disembarrassed of her charge ?' 'Not if he was going to sell her--not if he could convert her into money.' 'He has never been in England; he may not know how far the law would give him any power over her.' 'Don't trust that, Kate; a blackguard always can find out how much is in his favour everywhere.

If he doesn't know it now, he'd know it the day after he landed.' He paused an instant, and then said: 'There will be the devil to pay with old Peter Gill, for he'll want all the cash I can scrape together for Loughrea fair.