Rae alone kept her head. Neither mother nor father must be told till morning, she reflected. As for Judy and Tillytuck, they seemed stricken dumb. Tillytuck slipped off to his granary shaking his head and Judy climbed to her kitchen chamber, feeling, for the time at least, more crushed and cowed than ever in her life before.

“I’ve felt it coming,” she muttered, as she crept into bed forlornly. “I’ve been hearing he was going wid the bold young hussy. And Gintleman Tom knew it was coming, that he did. That was why he lit out like the knowing baste he was. He knew he cud niver be standing a Binnie. Oh, oh, if I did be knowing as much av magic as me grandmother I’d change her into a toad that I wud. What’ll be coming av it the Good Man Above only knows. One does be thinking the world cud be run a bit better. I’m fearing this will break Patsy’s heart.”

CHAPTER 37

All the rest of her life Pat knew she had left girlhood behind her on that dreadful night. Hope seemed to be blotted out entirely. Already the hours that had passed seemed like an eternity and tomorrow…all the tomorrows…would be just as bad. Her mind went round and round in a miserable circle and got nowhere. May Binnie living at Silver Bush…Silver Bush overrun with Binnies…they were a clannish crew in their way. Old Mr. Binnie who ate peas with his knife and old Mrs. Binnie who always sopped her bread in her gravy. And all the slangy, loud-voiced crew of them, the kind of people before whom you must always say everything over to yourself beforehand to be sure it was safe. What a crowd for Sid to have got himself mixed up with! No, it could not be faced.

Pat wouldn’t go down when morning came…couldn’t. For the first time in her life she was a shirker. She could hear them talking beneath her at the breakfast-table. She could hear May’s desecrating laugh. She clenched her hands in fury and wretchedness. She pulled down the blind and shut out a world that was too glad with its early sunshine and its purple mists.

Presently Rae came in…trim, alert, competent. Her blue eyes showed no traces of the tears she had shed in the night.

“Pat, I left you alone last night because I realized that a thing like this had much better be talked over in the morning.”

“What is the use of talking it over any time?” asked Pat listlessly.

“We must talk it over because we have to face the situation, Pat. There is no use in turning our back on it or squinting at it out of the corners of our eyes…or ignoring it. Let’s just get down to real things and look to the future.”