Pat sympathized with them and her heart hardened against Uncle Tom when she found him waiting for her at the old stile, half way along the Whispering Lane, where the trees screened them from the sight of both Swallowfield and Silver Bush. Pat was all for sailing on with a frosty nod but Uncle Tom put a shy hand on her shoulder.

“Pat,” he said slowly, “I’d…I’d like to have a little talk with you. It’s…it’s not often I have the chance to see you alone.”

Pat sat down on the stile ungraciously. She had a horrible presentiment of what Uncle Tom wanted to tell her. And she wasn’t going to help him out…not she! With his vanishing beard and his front doors and his apple barns he had kept everybody on the two farms jittery all summer.

“It’s…it’s a little hard to begin,” said Uncle Tom hesitatingly.

Pat wouldn’t make it any easier. She gazed uncompromisingly through the birches to a field where winds were weaving patterns in the ripening wheat and making sinuous shadows like flowing amber wine. But for once in her life Pat was blind to beauty.

Poor Uncle Tom took off his straw hat and mopped a brow that had not been so high some thirty-odd years back.

“I don’t know if you ever heard of a…a…a lady by the name of Merle Henderson,” he said desperately. Pat never had until Aunt Edith had mentioned her that day but…

“I have,” she said drily.

Uncle Tom looked relieved.

“Then…then perhaps you know that once…long ago…when I was young…ahem, younger…I…I…in short…Merle and I were…were…in short…” Uncle Tom burst out with the truth explosively…“I was desperately in love with her.”

Pat was furious to find her heart softening. She had always loved Uncle Tom…he had always been good to her…and he did look so pathetic.

“Why didn’t you marry her?” she asked gently.

“She…she wouldn’t have me,” said Uncle Tom, with a sheepish smile. Now that the plunge was over he found himself swimming. “Oh, I know Edith thinks she put the kibosh on it. But not by a jugful. If Merle would have married me a regiment of Ediths wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t wonder Merle turned me down. It would have been a miracle if she had cared for me…then. I was nothing but a raw boy and she…she was the most beautiful little creature, Pat. I’m not romantic…but she always seemed like a…like an ethereal being to me, Pat…a…a fairy, in short.”