Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those handwritings we associate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines and wafers: "Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you. "Maria Pinckney." Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with tears. It was the woman's voice that touched her, coming after Pinckney's business-like and jerky sentences. Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it had opened for her. Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney? She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this question. But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation. "I'll go," said Phyl. She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Hennessey's door. That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat--she was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis--and the Irish _Times_ spread on her knees. "Mrs. Hennessey," said Phyl, "I have just had a letter from my cousins in America, and they want me to go out to them." "Want you to go to America!" said Mrs. Hennessey. "On a visit, I suppose?" "No, to stay there." "To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for? Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It's extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they don't know, that's all that's to be said for them. It's like hearing people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you'd think they'd never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don't know the beauty of their own country or haven't eyes to see it, and they must go raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone's throw away from them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to her sons." "But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations." "Irish?" cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but the vision before her. "Those that can't see their own land aren't Irish. Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of understanding." She was off. With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles of Ireland.