of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth.

Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child. 81

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Oh, the loneliness! the desolation!

As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance, she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, “Gone West”; and she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the sunset of the Atlantic.

At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking, rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel where it was arranged they should meet.

Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection, had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough passage across the Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing skyscrapers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl. 82

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PART II

CHAPTER I

Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying.

But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feel after they are dead.

America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Settlers in Canada” and “Round the World in Eighty Days,” had given her pictures, and from these she had built up 

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