“I hate those people who are going to live in you,” she told the house. “I daresay they’ll tear you up and turn you inside out. That will break my heart. You won’t be you then.”

She went across the garden, along an old mossy walk where the unpruned rosebushes caught at her dress as if they wanted to hold her. Across the lawn, overgrown with grass, to the cherry orchard and around its curve. Then she stopped short in amazed embarrassment.

In a little semicircle of young spruces was a fire of applewood, like a vivid rose of night. Two people were squatted on the grass before it…two people and a dog and a cat. The dog, a splendid white and gold creature, who looked as if he could understand a joke, sat beside the man, and the cat, black, bigger than any cat had a right to be, with pale-green moonlike eyes, was snuggled down beside the girl, his beautiful white paws folded under his snowy breast. Pat, in a surge of unreasonable indignation…Bets had set out that semicircle of trees…muttered a curt “Pardon me…I didn’t mean to…intrude.”

She, Pat, an intruder here! It was bitter.

But before she could turn and vanish the girl had sprung to her feet, run across the intervening space and caught Pat’s arm.

“Don’t go,” she said imploringly. “Oh, don’t go. Stop and get acquainted. You must be one of the Gardiner girls from Silver Bush. I’ve been hearing about you.”

“I’m Pat Gardiner,” said Pat curtly. She knew she was being silly and bitter but for the moment she could not help it. She almost hated this girl: and yet there was something undeniably attractive about her. You felt that from the very first. She was a little taller than Pat and she wore knickerbockers and a khaki shirt. She had long, slanted, gray-green eyes with long fair lashes that should have gone with fair hair. But her hair was sloe-black, worn in a glossy braid around her head and waving back from her forehead in a peculiarly virile way. Her skin was creamy with a few freckles…delicious freckles, as if they had been shaken out of a pepper-pot over nose and tips of cheeks. She had a crooked clever mouth with a mutinous tilt. Pat didn’t think her a bit pretty but she felt drawn to that face in spite of herself.

“And I’m Suzanne Kirk. Really Suzanne. Christened so. Not Susan putting on frills. Now we know each other…or rather we’ve known each other for hundreds of years. I recognized you as soon as I saw you. Come and squat with us.”

Pat, still a little stiff, let herself be pulled over to the fire. She wanted to be friendly…and yet she didn’t.

“This is my brother, David, Miss Gardiner.”