“Don’t tell me,” said Aunt Edith. “He was simply fascinated from the moment she came. He went around like a man in a dream. But something held him back from the last fatal step and that something was you, Pat. She’ll be furious that he’s slipped through her fingers again of course.”

Still Pat held her tongue. They would never believe Mrs. Merridew had actually refused Tom and that he thanked heaven for his escape.

Life at Swallowfield and Silver Bush settled back into its customary tranquility.

“I must write all about it to Hilary,” said Pat, sitting down at her window in the afterglow. The world was afloat in primrose light, pale and exquisite. The garden below was alive with robins, and swallows were skimming low across the meadows. The hill field was a sea of wheaten gold and beyond it velvety dark spruces were caressing crystal air. How lovely everything was! How everything seemed to beckon to her! What a friendly farm Silver Bush was! And how beautiful it was to have a quiet evening again, with a “liddle bite” and a glorious gab-fest with Judy later on in prospect. And oh, how glad she was that there was to be no change at Swallowfield. Hilary would be glad to hear it, too.

“I wish I could slip that sunset into the letter and send it to him,” she thought. “I remember when I was about six saying to Judy, ‘Oh, Judy, isn’t it lovely to live in a world where there are sunsets?’ I still think it is.”

CHAPTER 15

During the autumn and winter after the shadow of a new bride at Swallowfield had vanished from Pat’s sky life went on at Silver Bush delightfully. It was a very cold winter…so cold that there was not only frost but feathers on the windows most of the time…and there was much snow and wild wind in birch and spruce. And never a thaw, not even in January, although Tillytuck was loath to give up hope of one.

“I’ve never seen a January without a thaw yet and I’ve seen hundreds of them,” he asserted…and wondered grumpily why everybody laughed. But he saw one that year. The cold continued unbroken. The stones around Judy’s flower beds always wore white snow caps and looked like humpy little gnomes. Pat was glad the garden was covered up. It always hurt her to see her beautiful garden in winters when there was little snow…so forsaken looking, with mournful bare flower stalks sticking up out of the hard frozen earth and bare, writhing shrubs that you never could believe could be mounds of rosy blossoms in June. It was nice to think of it sleeping under a spotless coverlet, dreaming of the time when the first daffodil would usher in spring’s age of gold.