Pat, who had been feeling very rich, suddenly felt poor…horribly poor. She went out into the garden and looked at Silver Bush…friendly Silver Bush with its lights welcoming all the world. Blossoms cool with night were around her but they meant nothing to her. Squedunk slithered through the delphiniums to rub against her leg and she never even noticed him. The color had gone out of everything.

“She dared to laugh at you…she dared to call you old-fashioned,” she whispered to the house. She shook her brown fist at the darkness. She had never been able to hear Silver Bush disparaged in any way. She had hated Uncle Brian last week because he had said that Silver Bush was settling on its foundations and getting a slant to its floors. And now she hated Suzanne Kirk. Suzanne, indeed! No more of Suzanne for her. To think she had been ready to accept her as a friend…to put her in Bets’ place! To think she had hobnobbed with her around the applewood fire and told her sacred things! But never again.

“I…I feel just like a caterpillar somebody had stepped on,” said Pat chokily.

In the kitchen the genius of prophecy had descended upon Tillytuck.

“That’ll be a match someday, mark my words, Judy Plum.”

“Ye wud better go out and look at the moon,” scoffed Judy. “Beaus don’t be so scarce at Silver Bush that Patsy nades to take up wid that. He do be old enough to be her father. We’ll have to be rale civil to him though, for they tell me he do be writing a book and if we offind him he might be putting us into it.”

Up at the Long House David Kirk was saying to Suzanne,

“She makes me think of a woodland brook.”

CHAPTER 17