Pat of Silver Bush by Lucy Maud Montgomery

who went away and was “never heard of again.” What fascination was in the phrase! Even dead people were heard of again. They had funerals and head-stones.
    And here was Aunt Honor as a baby. Looking like Cuddles! Oh, would Cuddles EVER look like Aunt Honor? It was unthinkable. How terribly people changed! Pat sighed.

10
    A Maiden all Forlorn

1
    At dusk there was the question of how Pat was to get home. Aunt Frances, who was the horsewoman of Bay Shore, was to have driven her. But Aunt Frances was still enduring God’s will in her bedroom and Aunt Honor hadn’t driven a horse for years. As for Cousin Dan, he couldn’t be trusted away from home with a team. Aunt Honor finally telephoned to the nearest neighbour.
    “Morton MacLeod is going to town. I thought he would, since it is Saturday night. He says he’ll take you and drop you off at Silver Bush. You don’t mind going as far as the MacLeod place alone, do you? You will be there before dark.”
    Pat didn’t mind anything except the prospect of staying at the Bay Shore overnight. And she was never in the least afraid of the dark. She had often been alone in it. The other children at her age had been afraid of the dark and ran in when it came. But Pat never did. They said at Silver Bush that she was “her father’s child” for that. Long Alec always liked to wander around alone at night … “enjoying the beauty of the darkness,” he said. There was a family legend that Pat at the age of four had slept out in the caraway in the orchard all one night, nobody missing her until Judy, who had been sitting up with a sick neighbour, came home at sunrise and raised a riot. Pat dimly remembered the family rapture when she was found and joy washing like a rosy wave over mother’s pale, distracted face.
    She said her good-byes politely and made her way up to the MacLeod place where bad news met her. Morton’s car was “acting up” and he had given up the idea of going to town.
    “So you’ll have to run back to the Bay Shore,” his mother told her kindly.
    Pat went slowly down the lane and when she was screened from sight of the house by a spruce grove she stopped to think. She did not want to go back to the Bay Shore. The very thought of spending the night in the big spare room, with its bed that looked far too grand to be slept in, was unbearable. No, she would just walk home. It was only three miles … she walked that every day going to school and back.
    Pat started off briskly and gaily, feeling very independent and daring and grown-up. How Judy would stare when she sauntered into the kitchen and announced carelessly that she had walked home from the Bay Shore all alone in the dark. “Oh, oh, and ain’t ye the bould one?” Judy would say admiringly.
    And then … the dark chilly night seemed suddenly to be coming to meet her … and when the road forked she wasn’t sure which fork to take … the left one? … oh, it must be the left one … Pat ran along it with sheer panic creeping into her heart.
    It was dark now … quite dark. And Pat suddenly discovered that to be alone on a strange road two miles from home in a very dark darkness was an entirely different thing from prowling in the orchard or running along the Whispering Lane or wandering about the Field of the Pool with the homelights of Silver Bush always in sight.
    The woods and groves around her, that had seemed so friendly on the golden September day were strangers now. The far, dark spruce hills seemed to draw nearer threateningly. Was this the right road? There were no homelights anywhere. Had she taken the wrong turn and was this the “line” road that ran along the backs of the farms between the two townships? Would she ever get home? Would she ever see Sid again … hear Winnie’s laugh and Cuddles’ dear little squeals of welcome? Last Sunday in church the choir had sung, “The night is dark and I am far from home.” She knew what that meant now as she broke into a desperate little