“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 everyone 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.”