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Where’s Nora?
by
There was something so convinced and decided about these arguments that Uncle Patsy, usually the calm autocrat of his young relatives, had nothing whatever to say. Nora was gently keeping step with his slow gait. She had won his heart once for all when she called him by the old boyish name her mother used forty years before, when they played together by the Wishing Brook.
“I wonder do you know a b’y named Johnny O’Callahan?” inquired Nora presently, in a somewhat confidential tone; “a pritty b’y that’s working on the railway; I seen him last night and I coming here; he ain’t a guard at all, but a young fellow that minds the brakes. We stopped a long while out there; somethin’ got off the rails, and he adwised wit’ me, seeing I was a stranger. He said he knew you, sir.”
“Oh, yes, Johnny O’Callahan. I know him well; he ‘s a nice b’y, too,” answered Patrick Quin approvingly.
“Yis, sir, a pritty b’y,” said Nora, and her color brightened for an instant, but she said no more.
II.
Mike Duffy and his wife came into the Quins’ kitchen one week-day night, dressed in their Sunday clothes; they had been making a visit to their well-married daughter in Lawrence. Patrick Quin’s chair was comfortably tipped back against the wall, and Bridget, who looked somewhat gloomy, was putting away the white supper-dishes.
“Where ‘s Nora?” demanded Mike Duffy, after the first salutations.
“You may well say it; I ‘m afther missing her every hour in the day,” lamented Bridget Quin.
“Nora’s gone into business on the Road then, so she has,” said Patrick, with an air of fond pride. He was smoking, and in his shirt-sleeves; his coat lay on the wooden settee at the other side of the room.
“Hand me me old coat there before you sit down; I want me pocket,” he commanded, and Mike obeyed. Mary Ann, fresh from her journey, began at once to give a spirited account of her daughter’s best room and general equipment for housekeeping, but she suddenly became aware that the tale was of secondary interest. When the narrator stopped for breath there was a polite murmur of admiration, but her husband boldly repeated his question. “Where’s Nora?” he insisted, and the Quins looked at each other and laughed.
“Ourselves is old hins that’s hatched ducks,” confessed Patrick. “Ain’t I afther telling you she’s gone into trade on the Road?” and he took his pipe from his mouth,–that after-supper pipe which neither prosperity nor adversity was apt to interrupt. “She ‘s set up for herself over-right the long switch, down there at Birch Plains. Nora ‘ll soon be rich, the cr’atur’; her mind was on it from the first start; ‘t was from one o’ them O’Callahan b’ys she got the notion, the night she come here first a greenhorn.”
“Well, well, she’s lost no time; ain’t she got the invintion!” chuckled Mr. Michael Duffy, who delighted in the activity of others. “What excuse had she for Birch Plains? There’s no town to it.”
“‘T was a chance on the Road she mint to have from the first,” explained the proud uncle, forgetting his pipe altogether; “’twas that she told me the first day she came out, an’ she walking along going home wit’ me to her dinner; ‘t was the first speech I had wit’ Nora. ”T is the mills you mane?’ says I. ‘No, no, Uncle Patsy!’ says she, ‘it ain’t the mills at all, at all; ‘t is on the Road I ‘m going.’ I t’ought she ‘d some wild notion she ‘d soon be laughing at, but she settled down very quiet-like with Aunty Biddy here, knowing yourselves to be going to Lawrence, and I told her stay as long as she had a mind. Wisha, she ‘d an old apron on her in five minutes’ time, an’ took hold wit’ the wash, and wint singing like a blackbird out in the yard at the line. ‘Sit down, Aunty!’ says she; ‘you ‘re not so light-stepping as me, an’ I ‘ll tell you all the news from home; an’ I ‘ll get the dinner, too, when I ‘ve done this,’ says she. Wisha, but she’s the good cook for such a young thing; ‘t is Bridget says it as well as meself. She made a stew that day; ‘t was like the ones her mother made Sundays, she said, if they ‘d be lucky in getting a piece of meat; ‘t was a fine-tasting stew, too; she thinks we ‘re all rich over here. ‘So we are, me dear!’ says I, ‘but every one don’t have the sinse to believe it.'”