Pat of Silver Bush by L. M. Montgomery Page A

resemble a face. But it did not grimace at Pat though she wished it would. There was a brilliant red-and-yellow china hen sitting on a yellow nest on a corner table that was very wonderful. And there were deep Battenburg lace scallops on the window shades. Surely even Castle McDermott couldn’t beat that.
    Pat would have liked to see all the hidden things in the house. Not its furniture or its carpets but the letters in old boxes upstairs and the clothes in old trunks. But this was impossible. She dared not leave the parlor. The aunts would die of horror if they caught her prowling.
    When everything in the room had been examined Pat curled herself up on the sofa and spent an absorbed hour looking at the pictures in old albums with faded blue and red plush bindings and in hinged leather frames that opened and shut like a book. What funny old pictures in full skirts and big sleeves and huge hats high up on the head! There was one of Aunt Frances in the eighties, in a flounced dress and a little “sacque” with its sloping shoulders and square scallops… and a frilled parasol. Oh, you could just see how proud she was of that parasol! It seemed funny to think of Aunt Frances as a little girl with a frivolous parasol.
    There was a picture of father…a young man without a moustache. Pat giggled over that. One of mother, too…a round, plump face, with “bangs” and a big bow of ribbon in her hair. And one of Great-uncle Burton 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.

CHAPTER 10
A Maiden All Forlorn
    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 neighbor.
    â€œMorton 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 neighbor, 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 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.
    â€œSo 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