On the day before this departure there fell an event, small in itself, yet so momentous in its outcome that in the story of Katrine it cannot remain untold. Sad and wide-eyed, she was sitting in her black frock, huddled close to the big pine-tree at the foot of the garden, when Barney O'Grady, the son of Nora, came out of the beech woods. He had been crying, and at sight of Katrine he threw himself on the grass, breaking into a passion of tears, and clutching at her skirt as a child might have done. "Barney!" Katrine cried. "Barney, dear, what's your trouble?" and she put a soft hand on the boy's tousled red hair. "Mother's going to leave me here," he said, "and I want to go. I hate it, hate it, hate it, here all alone! I want to go! I want to go!" he moaned. "Is it the money?" Katrine asked. "Yes," the boy answered, "there's not enough for us all. And I'm to stay with Mr. McDermott till I earn enough to come. And I want to go _now_." "But if you should get in New York, what would you do?" Katrine demanded. "Newspaper work," was the answer. "I've the gift for it," he explained, with an assured vanity, between his sobs. She had known such lonesomeness and understood it, yet, with all the willingness in the world to help the boy, she had not one penny which she might call her own. Nora kept everything, and she reasoned if Nora had made up her mind that Barney was to stay in North Carolina the chances were heavy that there he would remain. But the boy continued to sob appealingly, and Katrine, who had that real intelligence which no sooner sees a desired end than it finds a way to accomplish it, put her sorrow aside for practical thinking. She reviewed her possessions rapidly, remembering, with a throb of pain, some carved gold beads she had worn when "she found herself," at the age of three. They had always seemed part of her, and, though no one had told her, she knew they had belonged to her dead mother, "who went away." But she felt little hesitation in giving them, if some one were to be helped by the sacrifice. "Wait, Barney," she cried, "here, where Nora can't see you! I'll be back in a moment! They're just some old beads," she said, apologetically, with a splendid dissimulation, as she gave them to the boy. "But old Mrs. Quinby, at Marlton, tried to buy them of Nora once when they were being mended. Offer them for sale now. And, Barney," she went on, "if you could reconcile it to your conscience to keep it from your mother that I've given them to you; if you could with no lying, and yet without telling the truth--" She hesitated. "Ye needn't worry, Miss Katrine," he answered, drying his eyes on his sleeve. "It's been betwixt and between the truth with her all my life. But if the time ever comes when I can serve ye--" He choked. "Ah!" he cried, "words are poor things! But ye'll see!" And with this he was gone at a breakneck run down the Swamp Hollow toward the Marlton road.