Pat was really far more interested in Rae's matrimonial prospects than her own. For Rae seemed to be "swithering," as Judy put it, between two very nice young men. Bruce Madison of South Glen and Peter Alward of Charlottetown were both camping on the doorstep, and were frightfully and romantically jealous of each other, turning, so it was said, quite pale when they met. Life, as Tillytuck said, was dramatic because of it.
Pat had nothing against either of them ... except that they meant change ... and sometimes it was thought that Rae favoured one and then the other. She discussed them as flippantly as usual with Pat and Judy but both Pat and Judy were agreed that it was highly probable she would eventually decide on one of them. Pat hated the thought, of course. But if Rae had to marry some day ... of course it wouldn't be for years yet ... it MUST be somebody living near. Pat inclined to like Peter best but Judy favoured Bruce.
"We WOULD make an awfully good-looking couple," agreed Rae. "I really like Bruce best in summer but I have a rankling suspicion that Peter would be the best for winter. And he always makes me FEEL beautiful ... that's a knack some men never have, you may have noticed. But then ... his nose! Have you noticed his nose, Pat? It's not so bad now but in a few years it will be very bony and aristocratic. I can't exactly see myself eating breakfast every morning of my life with it opposite me. And it's terrible to think that my daughters might inherit it. It wouldn't matter so much about the boys ... a boy can get away with any kind of a nose because few girls are as sensitive to noses as I am. But the poor girls!"
Judy was horrified but she had no great liking for Peter's nose herself. So Silver Bush had its own fun out of the haunting suitors and the Golden Age seemed to have returned and nobody took anything very seriously until Pat went to a dance at the Bay Shore Hotel and Donald Holmes, as Rae announced at the breakfast table next morning, fell for her with a crash that could be heard for miles. What was more, Pat blushed, actually blushed, when Rae said this. Everybody drew the same conclusion from that blush. Pat had met her fate.
At once everybody in the Gardiner clan sat up and took notice. For the rest of the summer Donald Holmes was a constant visitor at Silver Bush. Rae and her two jealous suitors no longer held the centre of the stage. Everybody approved. The Holmes family had the proper social and political traditions, and Donald himself was the junior partner in a prosperous firm of chartered accountants.
"Oh, oh, that do be something like now," Judy told Tillytuck delightedly. "There's brading there. And he'll wear well. Patsy was in the right be waiting."
"Methinks I smell the fragrance of orange blossoms, symbolically speaking," Tillytuck remarked to Uncle Tom.
"Well, it's about time," said Uncle Tom, who was not given to symbols.
"It's really better luck than she deserves after all her flirtations," said Aunt Edith rather sourly.
Pat herself believed she was in love ... really in love. There were weeks of pretty speeches and prettier silences and enchanted moons and stars and kittens ... though in her secret soul she suspected him of not caring overmuch about cats. But at least he pretended to like the kittens. One couldn't have everything. He was well-born, well-bred, good-looking and charming, and for the first time since the days of Lester Conway Pat felt thrills and queer sensations generally.
"I thought I'd left all that behind with seventeen," she told Rae, "but it really seems to have come back."
Rae, who was expecting "one of the men she's engaged to ..." à la May Binnie ... carefully perfumed her throat.
"A plain answer to a plain question, Pat. Do you mean to marry him?"
"I'm not Betty Baxter," said Pat with a twinkle.
"Don't be exasperating. Every one knows he means to ask you. Candidly, Pat, I'd like him very much for a brother-in-law."
Pat looked sober. In imagination she saw the paragraph in the Charlottetown papers announcing her engagement.
"I blush when I hear his step at the door," she said meditatively.
"I've noticed that myself," grinned Rae.
"And I suffer agonies of jealousy if he says a word of admiration for any other girl. On the whole ... I haven't quite made up my mind ... not quite ... but I THINK, Rae, when HE says, 'Will you please?' I'LL say, 'Yes, thank you.'"
Rae got up and hugged Pat chokily.
"I'm glad ... I'm glad. And yet I'm on the point of howling."
"Confidence for confidence, Rae. Which, if either, of your young men do you intend to marry?"
Rae pulled an ear of Squedunk, who was sitting on his haunches on her bed, gazing at the girls with his usual limpid, round-eyed look. Gentleman Tom looked as if all the wisdom of the ages was his, Bold-and-Bad looked as if life was one amusing adventure, but Squedunk always looked as if he could be a kitten forever if he wanted to.
"Pat, I wish I knew. I've been horribly flippant about it but that was just to cover up. I really don't know. I do like them both so much ... Pat, is it ever possible to be in love with two men? It isn't in books, I know ... but in life? Because I DO love them both. They're both darlings. But, Pat, honestly, the minute I decide I like Bruce best I find I have a mind to Peter. And vice versa. That's all I can say yet. Well, Norma's wedding comes off next week. Judy is furious because they are going to rehearse the whole ceremony in the church the night before. 'Nixt thing they'll be rehearsing the funerals,' she says. Judy will be simply mad with delight if you marry Donald. And yet she'll die of sorrow when you go. When you go ... that turns me cold. Oh, Pat, wouldn't life be nice and simple if people never fell in love? I wish I COULD make up my mind between Bruce and Peter. But I just can't. If I could only marry them both."
The shrieks of an anguished car resounded from the yard and Rae ran down to welcome Bruce ... or it may have been Peter.
The next afternoon Pat, as she expressed it, "put off Martha and put on Mary," and hied herself to her Secret Field, although there was apple jelly to make and cucumbers to pickle. She went through the mysterious emerald light of the maple woods, where it seemed as if there must have been silence for a hundred years, and sat down on an old log covered with a mat of green moss in the corner of her field. It had changed so little in all the years. It was still her own and it still held secret understanding with her. But to- day something came between her soul and it. In spite of everything something touched her with unrest ... the certainty of coming change, perhaps.
She looked up at a splash of crimson in the maple above her head. Another summer almost gone. There was a hint of autumn and decay and change in the air, even the air of the Secret Field, with the purples of its bent grasses. Yes, she would marry Donald Holmes. She was quite sure she loved him. Pat stood up and waved a kiss to the Secret Field. When she next saw it she would belong to Donald Holmes.
She had intended to call at Happiness on her way home ... she had not been there all summer ... but she did not. Happiness belonged to things that were ... things that had passed ... things that could never return.