Judy was in the kitchen, telling stories to a couple of Aunt Hazel’s small fry who were visiting at Silver Bush. Pat caught a sentence or two as she went out. “Oh, oh, the ears av him, children dear! He cud hear the softest wind walking over the hills and what the grasses used to say to aich other at the sunrising.” Dear old Judy! What a matchless storyteller she was!

“I remember how Joe and Win and Sid and I used to sit on the backdoor steps and listen to her telling fairy tales by moonlight,” thought Pat, “and whatever she told you you felt had happened…must have happened. That is the difference between her yarns and Tillytuck’s. Oh, it is really awful to think of her going away in the fall for a whole winter.”

Pat went up to the Long House by the old delightful short cut past Swallowfield and over the brook and up the hill fields. It was a long time since she had trodden that fairy path but it had not changed. The fields on the hill still looked as if they loved each other. The big silver birch still hung over the log bridge across the brook. The damp mint, crushed under her feet, still gave out its old haunting aroma, and all kinds of wild blossom filled the crevices of the stone dyke where she and Bets had picked wild strawberries. Its base was still lost in a wave of fern and bayberry. And on the hill the Watching Pine still watched and seemed to shake a hand meaningly at her. At the top was the old gate, fallen into ruin, and beyond it the path through the spruce bush where silence seemed to kneel like a gray nun and she felt that Bets must come to meet her, walking through the dusk with dreams in her eyes.

Past the bush she came out on the garden with the house in the midst. Pat stopped and gazed around her. Everything she looked on had some memory of pleasure or pain. The old garden was very eloquent…that old garden that had once been so beloved by Bets. She seemed to come back again in the flowers she had tended and loved. The whole place was fall of her. She had planted that row of lilies…she had trained that vine over the trellis…she had set out that rosebush by the porch step. But most of it was now a festering mass of weeds and in its midst was the sad, empty house, with the little dormer window in its spruce-shadowed roof…the window of the room where she had seen the sunrise light falling over Bets’ dead face. A dreadful pang of loneliness tore her soul.