Then followed a piteous appeal--it was actually a cry for protection. Her father, she said, had determined to devote her to the stage, and already had taken steps to sell her--she said she used the word advisedly--for so many years to the impresario of the ‘Fenice’ at Venice, her voice and musical skill being such as to give hope of her becoming a prima donna. She had, she said, frequently sung at private parties at Rome, but only knew within the last few days that she had been, not a guest, but a paid performer. Overwhelmed with the shame and indignity of this false position, she implored her mother’s brother to compassionate her. ‘If I could not become a governess, I could be your servant, dearest uncle,’ she wrote. ‘I only ask a roof to shelter me, and a refuge. 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. He counts on having eighty sheep down there at the long crofts, and a cow or two besides. That’s money’s worth, girl!’