It was the one cloud on Pat’s horizon that summer. Some change was brewing and change at Swallowfield was nearly as bad as change at Silver Bush. Everything had been the same there for years. Aunt Edith and Aunt Barbara had held sway in the house, agreeing quite amicably in the main, and both bossing Uncle Tom for his soul’s and body’s good. And now both were uneasy. Tom was getting out of hand.

“It has to do with those California letters…I’m sure it has,” Aunt Barbara told Pat unhappily. “We know he gets them…the post-office people have told it…but we’ve never seen one of them. We don’t know where on earth he keeps them…we’ve looked everywhere. Edith says if she can find them she’ll burn them to ashes but I don’t see what good that would do. We haven’t an idea who she is…Tom must mail his answers in town.”

“If Tom brings a…a wife in here…” Aunt Edith choked over the word…“you and I will have to go, Barbara.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Edith.” Aunt Barbara was on the verge of tears. She loved Swallowfield almost as much as Pat loved Silver Bush.

“I will say it and I do say it,” repeated Aunt Edith inflexibly. “Can you think for one minute of us staying here, under the thumb of a new mistress? We can get a little house at the Bridge, I suppose.”

“I can’t believe Uncle Tom will really be so foolish at his age,” said Pat.

“I have never been a man,” said Aunt Barbara somewhat superfluously, “but this I do know…a man can be a fool at any age. And you know the old proverb. Tom is fifty-nine.”

“I sometimes think,” said Aunt Barbara slowly, “that you…that we…didn’t do quite right when we broke off Tom’s affair with Merle Henderson, long ago, Edith.”

“Nonsense! What was there to break off?” demanded Aunt Edith crisply. “They weren’t engaged. He had a schoolboy’s fancy for her…but you know as well as I do, Barbara, that it would never have done for him to have married a Henderson.”

“She was a clever, pretty little thing,” protested Aunt Barbara.

“Her tongue was hung in the middle and her grandmother was insane,” said Aunt Edith.

“Well, Dr. Bentley says everybody is a little insane on some points. I do think we shouldn’t have meddled, Edith.”

Aunt Barbara’s “we” was a concession to peace. Both of them knew it had been Edith’s doings alone.