Everybody at Silver Bush loved the birch grove, though to none of them did it mean what it meant to Pat. For her it lived. She not only knew the birches but they knew her: the fern-sweet solitudes, threaded with shadows, knew her: the wind in the boughs always made her a glad salutation. From the first beginnings of memory she had played in it and wandered in it and dreamed in it. She could not remember the time it had not held her imagination in thrall and dominated her life. In childhood it had been peopled by the leprechauns and green folk of Judy Plum’s stories: and now that those dear and lovely beliefs had drifted away from her like faint and beckoning wraiths their old magic still haunted the silver bush. It could never be to Pat just the ordinary grove of white-skinned trees and ferny hollows it was to other people. But then, Pat, so her family always said, was just a little different from other people, too. She had been different when she was a big-eyed child…different when she was a brown, skinny little imp in her early teens…and still different, now that she was twenty and ought, so Judy Plum felt, to be having beaus.

There had been a boy or two in Pat’s past but Judy considered them mere experiments. Pat, however, did not seem to want beaus, in spite of Judy’s sly hints. All she really wanted, or seemed to want, was to “run” Silver Bush and take care of mother…who was a bit of an invalid…and see that as few changes as possible came into existence there. If she could have been granted a fairy wish it would be that she might wave a wand and make everything remain exactly the same for at least a hundred years.

She loved her home with a passion. She was deeply loyal to it…to its faults as well as its virtues…though she would never admit it had any faults. Every small thing about it gave her the keenest joy. If she went away for a visit she was homesick until she could return to it.

“Silver Bush isn’t her house…it’s her religion,” Uncle Brian had once said teasingly.