She was in the birch grove when Donald came to her the next evening. Donald Holmes was really a fine chap and deeply in love with Pat. To him she looked like love incarnate. She had a kitten on her shoulder and her dress was a young leaf green with a scarlet girdle. There was something about her face that made him think of pine woods and upland meadows and gulf breezes. He had come to ask her a certain question and he asked it, simply and confidently, as he had a right to ask it ... for if any girl had ever encouraged a man Pat had encouraged Donald Holmes that summer.
Pat turned a little away from his flushed, eager face. Through a gap in the trees she saw the dark purple of the woods on Robinson's hill ... the blue sheen of the gulf ... the green of the clover aftermath in the Field of the Pool ... the misty opal sky ... and Silver Bush!
She turned to Donald and opened her lips to say, "yes." She found herself trembling.
"I'm ... I'm terribly sorry," was what she said. "I can't marry you. I thought I could but I can't."
5
"I rather think I hope there'll be an earthquake before to-morrow morning," thought Pat when she went to bed that night. The whole world had gone very stale and life seemed greyer than ashes. In a way she was actually disappointed. She would miss Donald horribly. But leave Silver Bush for him? Impossible!
She knew she was in for a terrible time with her clan and she was not mistaken. By the time they got through with her she felt, as she confided to the not overly sympathetic Rae, "like a bargain counter of soiled rayon." Even mother was a little disappointed.
"COULDN'T you have cared for him, darling?"
"I thought I could ... I thought I did ... mother, I just can't explain. I'm dreadfully sorry ... I'm so ashamed of myself ... I deserve everything that is being said of me ... but I couldn't."
Everybody was saying plenty. All her relatives took turns heckling her about it. Long Alec gave her a piece of his mind.
"But I didn't love him, father ... I really didn't," said poor Pat miserably.
"It's a pity you didn't find that out a little sooner," said Long Alec sourly. "I don't like hearing my daughter called a jilt. No, don't smile at me like that, miss. Let me tell you you trade too much on that smile. THIS is past being a joke."
"You'll go through the woods and pick up a crooked stick yet," warned Aunt Edith darkly.
"There's really been too much of this, Aunt Edith," protested Pat, feeling that any self-respecting worm had to turn sometime. "I'm not going to marry anybody just to please the clan."
"What CAN she be wanting in the way of a husband?" moaned Aunt Barbara.
"Heaven knows," said Aunt Edith ... but in a tone that sounded very dubious of heaven's knowledge. "She'll never have such a chance again."
"You know you aren't getting any younger, Pat," Uncle Tom objected mildly. "Why couldn't you have cottoned to him?"
Pat was flippant to hide her feelings.
"My English and Scotch blood liked him, Uncle Tom, but the French didn't and I was none too sure about the Irish."
Uncle Tom shook his head.
"If you don't watch out all the men will be grabbed," he said gloomily. "Beaus aren't found hanging on bushes, you know."
"If they were it would be all right," said Pat, more flippantly than ever. "One needn't pick them then. Just let them hang."
Uncle Tom gave it up. What could you do with a she like that?
Aunt Jessie said that the Selbys were always changeable and Uncle Brian said he could always have told her that Pat was only making a fool of young Holmes for her own amusement and Aunt Helen said Pat had always been different from anybody else.
"A girl who would rather ramble in the woods than go to a dance. Don't tell me she's normal."
Most odious of all was the sympathetic Mrs. Binnie who said when she met her,
"You seem to have bad luck with your beaus, Pat dearie. But never be cast down even if he has slipped through your fingers. There's as good fish in the sea as ever come out of it. And you know, dearie, even if you can't git a husband there's lots of careers open to gals nowadays."
It was hard to take that from a Binnie. As if Donald Holmes had jilted her! And harder still to hear that Donald Holmes' mother was saying that that Gardiner girl had deliberately led her son on ... kept him dangling all summer and then threw him over.
"But I deserve it, I suppose," thought poor Pat bitterly.
The only person who was not reported as saying anything was Donald Holmes himself, who preserved an unbroken silence and behaved, as Aunt Edith averred, in the most gentlemanly fashion about everything connected with the whole pitiable affair.
Judy was upset at first but soon came round when every one else was blaming her darling and recollected that Donald Holmes had had a very quare sort of great-uncle.
"A bit av a miser and always wint about as shabby as a singed cat. Aven the dogs stopped to look at him, him being that peculiar. And I'm minding there did be a cousin somewhere on the mother's side dressed up in weeds and wint to the church widding av a man who had jilted her. Oh, oh, and it's liable to crop out inny time and that I will declare and maintain."
Sid, too, to Pat's surprise, stood up for her.
"Let her alone. If she doesn't want to marry Donald Holmes she doesn't have to."
Pat lingered late in the garden one night. There was a mirth of windy trees all about Silver Bush and a misty, cloud-blown new moon hanging over it. First the twilight was golden-green, then emerald. Afar off the evening hills were drawing purple hoods about them. In spite of everything Pat felt at peace with her own soul as she had not done for a long time.
"If it's foolish to love Silver Bush better than any man I'll always be a fool," she said to herself. "Why, I BELONG here. What an unbelievable thing that I was just on the point of saying something to Donald that would have cut me off from it forever."
As she turned to leave the garden she said passionately and quite sincerely,
"I hope nobody will ever ask me to marry him again." And then a thought darted quite unbidden into her mind.
"I'm glad I don't have to tell Hilary I'm engaged."
6
There came a grim day in November with nothing at first to distinguish it from other days. But in mid-afternoon Gentleman Tom gravely got down from the cushion of Great Grandfather Nehemiah's chair and looked all about him. Judy and Pat watched him as they made the cranberry pies and turkey dressing for Thanksgiving. He gave one long look at Judy, as she recalled afterwards, then walked out of the house, across the yard and along the Whispering Lane, with his thin black tail held gallantly in air. They watched him out of sight but did not attach much importance to his going. He often went on such expeditions, returning at nightfall. But the dim changed into darkness on this particular night and Gentleman Tom had not returned. Gentleman Tom never did return. It seemed a positive calamity to the folks at Silver Bush. Many beloved cats of old days had long been hunting mice in the Elysian fields but their places had soon been filled by other small tigerlings. None, it was felt, could fill Gentleman Tom's place. He had been there so long he seemed like one of the family. They really felt that he must go on living forever.
No light was ever thrown on his fate. All enquiries were vain. Apparently no mortal eye had seen Gentleman Tom after he had gone from Silver Bush. Pat and Rae were mournfully certain that some dire fate had overtaken him but Judy would not have it.
"Gintleman Tom has got the sign and gone to his own place," she said mysteriously. "Don't be asking me where it might be ... Gintleman Tom did be always one to kape his own counsel. Do ye be minding the night we all thought ye were dying, Patsy dear? I'm not denying I'll miss him. A discrate, well-behaved baste he was. All he iver wanted was his own cushion and a bit av mate or a sup av milk betwane times. Gintleman Tom was niver one to cry over spilt milk, was he now?"