“Oh, oh, I wasn’t ixpicting it,” said Judy with no smile. She did not know whether to feel relieved or disappointed. She did not quite like Cleaver, who was an honor graduate of McGill and was spending his summer doing research work at the Silverbridge harbor. Pat had got acquainted with him at the Long House and he had dangled a bit round Silver Bush. He was enormously clever and his researches into various elusive bacilli had already put him in the limelight. But poor Cleaver looked rather like a magnified bacillus himself and Judy, try as she would, could not see him as a husband for Pat.

“It’ll be the widower yet, I’m fearing,” she told Tillytuck in the graveyard. “Spacially if this news we’re hearing about Jingle is true. I’ve always had me own ideas…but I do be only an ould fool and getting no younger, as Mrs. Binnie do be saying ivery once in so long.”

“Old Matilda Binnie has a new set of teeth and a new fur coat,” said Tillytuck. “Now, if she could get a new set of brains she might do very well for a while.” He took a few whiffs at his pipe and then added gravely, “Symbolically speaking.”

CHAPTER 41

Aunt Edith died very suddenly in August. They all felt the shock of it. None of them had ever loved Aunt Edith very much…she was not a lovable person. But she was part of the established order of things and her passing meant another change. Oddly enough, Judy, who had had a lifelong vendetta with her, seemed to mourn and miss her most. Judy thought life would be almost stodgy when there was no Aunt Edith to horrify and exchange polite, barbed jabs with.

“Whin I think I’ll niver see her in me kitchen agin, insulting me, I do be having a very quare faling, Patsy dear.”

It was of course May who told Pat, with much relish, that Hilary Gordon was engaged. Some Binnie had had a letter from another Binnie who lived in Vancouver and knew the girl. She and Hilary were to be married when he returned from his year abroad and he was to be taken into the noted firm of architects in which her father was the senior partner.

“He was a beau of yours long ago, wasn’t he, when you were a young girl?” asked May in a malicious drawl.

“I think it’s true,” Rae told Pat that night. “I heard it some time ago. Dot has friends in Vancouver and they wrote it to her. I…I didn’t know whether to tell you or not.’

“Why on earth shouldn’t you tell me?” said Pat very coldly.

“Well…” Rae hesitated…“you and Hilary were always such friends…”