Patsy | Page 7

different corners of the yard, ready to check growlings which might end in fights with the stern toe of a mountain boot, very proper to the purpose.
Even oftener than her father, Patsy came to Glenanmays. It was good to get away from the dear but dull house of Cairn Ferris, the schooled and disciplined servants, the gentle but constant and masterful supervision of her old nurse, Annie McQuilliam.
She loved her home. She loved all who were in it. But there was no one of her own age at Cairn Ferris, and here at Glenanmays she could dip deep in the fountain of youth. Of the four girls, Faith and Elspeth were her seniors, and she looked up to them, sitting at their feet and keeping her secrets as carefully from them as she would have done from her own father.
But the third, Jean, a tall slight girl with head coiled about by swathes of fair hair, was year for year, month for month, Patsy's own age. And neither had any secrets from the other. Hopes, fears, anticipations were exchanged, but cautiously and in whispers, like young bathers who test the chill of the sea with bent, temerarious toes. So they touched and paused, shivering on the brink of the incoming tide of life.
M��nie Garland, the youngest of all, was then a slim girl still at Stranryan Grammar School, with the softest eyes and the most wonderful voice, round-throated and full-chested even at the ungrateful age of fourteen.
Not the three brothers Garland, Fergus, Stair and Agnew, stalwart and brown, nor yet the two elder girls--not little M��nie coming singing like a linnet over the moor, brought Patsy so often that way. But the quiet talks with Jean--Jean who had learned wisdom from her sisters' love affairs, from the escapades of her brothers, and who, by the rude rule of fact, could reduce to cautious verity the fiction which Patsy had learned from her Uncle Julian's books.
So Patsy went often to Glenanmays, and without interrupting the busy round of the afternoon's duties, prescribed by Diarmid for each member of his family, she made her way to the little shed hidden by the burnside, on the green in front of which the clothes-lines were strung, and clean garments fluttered in the sea-wind, fresh and glad as ship's bunting.
"Yes," Jean Garland would say after the girls had kissed one another, "I was up early this morning--soon after dawn. Madge Blair and I had our arms in the tubs by half-past three, and she had got the pot to boil before that. So now I am ready for the ironing, and--"
"Oh, let me help!" cried Patsy.
"Very well," Jean acquiesced, "you are getting to be none so ill with the goffering iron and the pliers--"
"Better with the fancy than the plain!" laughed Patsy.
"It is to be expected, you have the light hand, and you have taste--most have neither one nor the other, but iron for all the world like a roller going over a wet field."
They worked a while in silence, only looking up occasionally and smiling at each other, or Jean might throw in a hint as to a frill or tucker which must be dealt with in a particular way.
Suddenly Jeanie Garland came nearer, a pile of folded linen over her arm.
"Have you heard anything of the press-gang at your house, Patsy?"
"Nothing," said Patsy, busy with a best Sunday cap, all lace frills and furbelows. "Of course there is always Captain Laurence at Stranryan. On clear nights you can hear his fifes and drums by standing on the stile above our house, and they say there is a King's ship or two about Belfast Lough--but why do you ask?"
Jean Garland paused yet nearer to Patsy and spoke in her ear.
"It's the lads!" she murmured. "They are in it. I am feared for them."
"What?" exclaimed Patsy, but checked by a glance she instantly lowered her voice--"not Fergus and Stair and Agnew?"
Jean nodded slightly.
"Does their father know?" Patsy whispered back. Jean preserved a grave face.
"Not any one of us, his own family, can guess what Diarmid Garland knows and does not know. He had his time of the Free Trading. He was at the head of it, and if the boys head a clean run from the Dutch coast or the Isle of Man--why, if father is ignorant of the business, it is because he wishes to be."
"But there is nothing new in all that," said Patsy; "there have always been smugglers and shore lads who helped them--always King's cutters and preventive men to chase and lose them--what danger do the boys run more than at other times?"
"This," said Jean Garland, very gravely, "there is a new superintendent of enlistments at Stranraer. He is just a spy, one Eben McClure from Stonykirk, a man of our