The lane finally led out to the back fields of the other place and Pat found her way to Happiness and sat down near the Haunted Spring in a little hollow among the ferny cradle-hills. Far down before her, beyond the still, golden pastures, was the sapphire of the gulf. Over the westering hill of spruce a sunset of crimson and warm gold was fading out into apple green. And all this beauty was hers just for the looking. In these silent and remembered places she could think of old, beloved things…of sunsets she and Hilary had watched there together…Hilary, who at this very moment would be somewhere on the ocean on his way back from his summer in Europe. He had written her most delightful letters but she was glad he would soon be back in Canada. It would be pleasant to think that the Atlantic no longer rolled between them. She wondered a little wistfully why he couldn’t have planned to stop off for a few days on the Island on his way to Toronto. She had asked him to. And he had never even referred to the invitation, although he had wound up his letter by saying “my love to Silver Bush.” She could see from where she sat her name and his cut on a maple tree and overgrown with lichen. Pat sighed sentimentally. She wished she could be a child again with no worries. To be sure she had thought she had worries then…father going west and thinking you were ugly and Joe running away to sea and things like that. But there had been no men then…no question of beaus and people who persisted in turning into lovers when all you wanted of them was to be friends. Jim Mallory was in love with her now. She had met him at a dance in Silverbridge and, as Rae told Hilary in her next letter to him, he fell for her with a crash that could be heard for miles. He was a really fine fellow…“oh, oh, that’s something like now,” Judy said, the first evening he came to Silver Bush. Pat liked him terribly…almost as much as she liked Hilary and David. Rae told Judy she believed Pat was really in love but Judy had grown pessimistic under repeated disappointments.

“I’ve no great faith in it lasting,” she said.