For one awful moment Pat had felt as if Rae…this Rae…were a stranger to her. She had been away from Silver Bush for only three weeks and this had happened.

“I know.” Rae squeezed Pat’s hand. “And I know it must all seem like indecent haste to you. But if you count time by heart-throbs as somebody says you should, it’s been a century since I met him. He isn’t a stranger. He’s one of our kind…like Hilary…knows all our quacks, really he does. You’ll understand when you meet him, Pat.”

Pat did understand. She couldn’t find a single fault with Brook Hamilton. As a brother-in-law he was everything that could be desired. Tall, lean, with intensely blue eyes and straight black brows. Certainly he and Rae made a wonderful-looking young pair in spite of his “rather ugly” face. She couldn’t hate him as she had hated Frank, even if he were going to take her sister away. But, mercifully, not for a long time yet. And there was no doubt that Rae loved him.

“I wish I could love somebody like that,” said Pat, with a little pang of envy. She sat alone for a long time in her room that evening while the robins whistled outside and the purple night sky looked down on her. So, in the years to come, she would always have to sit alone. For the first time in her life Pat felt old…for the first time a little chill of fear for her own future touched her She almost hated Bold-and-Bad for purring so loudly on the bed. It was outrageous that a cat should be so blatantly happy. Really Bold-and-Bad had no tact.

“I suppose,” thought Pat dolefully, “the time will come when I’ll have nothing left but a cat.” Then she brightened up. “And Silver Bush. That will be enough,” she added softly.

At bedtime she knelt by Rae’s bed and put her arm across Rae’s shoulders.

“Cuddles dear,” she said, slipping back to the old nickname, “Brook is a dear…and I think you’re both lucky…and I love you…love you…love you.”

“Pat, you’re the dearest thing in the world. And why didn’t you cast the Reverend Wheeler of happy memory up to me and remind me of the time I thought I was in love with him? I really expected you to do it…I don’t know how any human being could have resisted doing it.”

Judy was only moderately pleased over the engagement because of the prospect of China.