“I can’t bear it any longer…I can’t,” she said wildly. She twitched the shade to pull it down and shut out the insulting sunlight. It escaped her and whizzed wildly to the top, thereby nearly scaring to death Bold-and-Bad, asleep on Rae’s bed.

“You don’t deserve a cat,” said Bold-and-Bad, or words to that effect.

Pat glared at him.

“To think that it has come to this at Silver Bush!”

Rae, coming in a little later with the mail and an armful of blossom, turned the key in the door. That was necessary now. There was no longer the old-time privacy at Silver Bush. May might bounce in on them at any time without the pretense of knocking. She merely laughed at the idea of knocking and called it “Silver Bush airs.”

“Pat, darling, don’t take it so to heart. I admit there’s a time every day when May makes me yearn for the good old days when you could pull peoples’ wigs off. But when I feel that way I just reflect what Brook’s eyes would make of her…can’t you see the twinkle in them?…and she shrinks to her proper perspective. It isn’t going to last forever.”

“It is…it is,” cried Pat wildly. “Rae, May doesn’t want to have a house built on the other place…she wants to have Silver Bush. I’ve heard her talking to Sid…I couldn’t help hearing…you know what her voice is like when she’s angry. ‘I’ll never go to live on the Adams place…it would be so far out of the world…you can’t move all them barns. You told me when you persuaded me to marry you that we would live at Silver Bush. And I’m going to…and it won’t be under the thumb of your old-maid sister either. She’s nothing but a parasite…living off your father when there’s nothing now to prevent her from going away and earning her own living when I’m here to run things.’ She’s doing her best to set Sid against us all…you know she is. And she attributes some petty motive to everything we do or say…or don’t say. Remember the scene she made last week because I hadn’t taken any notice of her new dress…that awful concoction of cheap radium lace over that sleazy bright blue silk. I thought the kindest thing I could do was not to take notice of it. I was ashamed to think anyone at Silver Bush could wear such a thing. And she tells Sid we’re always laughing at her.”

“Well, you did laugh last night when she said that thing about the moon,” grinned Rae.