David walked home with her as he always did. Pat had never until tonight stopped to think how very pleasant those walks home were. Tonight the hills were dreamy under a harvest moon. They went through the close-set spruce grove that always seemed to be guarding so many secrets…down the field path under the Watching Pine that still watched…for what?…over the brook and along the Whispering Lane. At the gate where they always parted they stood in silence for a little while, lost in the beauty of the night. Faint music came to them. It was only Tillytuck playing in his lair but, muted by the distance, it sounded like some fairy melody under a haunted moon. Beyond the trees were great quietudes of sky where burned the stars that never changed…the only things that never changed.

David was thinking that silence with Pat was more eloquent than talk with any other woman. He was also wondering what Pat would do or say if he suddenly did what he had always wanted to do…put his arm about her and said, “darling.” What he did say was almost as shattering to Pat’s new-found mood of contentment.

“Has Suzanne told you her little secret yet?”

Suzanne? A secret? There was only one kind of a secret people spoke about in that tone. Pat involuntarily put up her hand as if warding off a blow.

“No…o…o,” she said faintly.

“She probably would have if you had been alone with her to-night. She’s very happy. She has made up a quarrel she had before we came here with an old lover…and they are engaged.”

It was too much…it really was. So Suzanne was to be lost to her, too! And she had to be polite and say something nice.

“I…I…hope she will always be very happy,” she gasped.

“I think she will,” said David quietly. “She has loved him for years…I never knew just what the trouble was. We’re a secretive lot, we Kirks. Of course they won’t be married till he has finished college. He has had to work his way through. And then…what am I to do, Pat?”

“You…you’ll miss her,” said Pat. She knew she was being incredibly stupid.

“You’ll have to tell me what to do, Pat,” David said, bending a little nearer, his voice taking on a very significant tone.

Was David by any chance proposing to her? And if he were what on earth could she say? She wasn’t going to say anything! She had had enough shocks for one day…Hilary engaged…gray hair…Suzanne engaged! Oh, why must life be such an uncertain thing? You never knew where you were…you never had security…you never knew when there might not be some dreadful bolt from the blue. She would just pretend she hadn’t heard David’s question and go in. Which she did.