“They don’t want us, and you look too tired to walk. I expect you’ve been lying awake instead of going to sleep the last two or three nights, worrying about future plans. Perhaps it isn’t quite fair to press you any more now. Anyhow, I’ve had more to-day than ever before, and I feel I can afford to wait. If I don’t say any more about the future, dear, will you just sit quietly there and rest until tea-time? See, I’ll give you two more days to get thoroughly readjusted to the new order of events, then I shall come to the Parsonage and claim you. Will you agree to stay here quietly, Paddy, if I promise not to worry you?” She murmured an assent. “That’s a sensible little woman. I’ll clean my gun—do you see? I like doing it myself occasionally, and I’ve often thought how I’d love to do those sorts of things in here with you—I fiddling round with my hobbies and you sitting there—no need to say anything, but just to see your skirts, and your little feet, and your hair, and feel in every breath of me, not only that you are there, but that you _belong_ there.” He moved away. “I suppose we’re all family men at heart, directly we pass the frivolous stage and have wearied of banal excitements. I never meant to be anything but a bachelor, but now I want a home and a fireside that is the real thing the same as all the rest of them. I want you—_belonging_ there. “But I’m trespassing already. If I don’t mind you’ll fly yet—you’re such a wild little bird. Don’t take any notice; you can go to sleep if you like. There’s just half an hour before tea-time. No one will know you are here; they are all too taken up with each other to think of anything else.” Paddy closed her eyes gratefully, wondering why she felt so deathly tired. CHAPTER XLII “What would an Irish Fusilier do?” They thought her a little strange at home that evening, but after a time Jack and Eileen vanished, and making a tremendous effort, she contrived to chatter to the aunties about her dispensing in a fairly brisk fashion. She did not, however, altogether blind them, and she was glad enough when the need ceased, and she could go to bed. Eileen was sleeping with her mother, and Jack at the inn, so that she had his little room all to herself, and as soon as she was alone she flung herself down on the bed and burst into tears, overstrained nature finding no other mode of relief. When she had had her cry out, she lay quite still and tried to think—tried to understand how it was that the question she had meant to settle once for all in the afternoon was more unsettled than ever. Why was it more unsettled? There could not possibly be any temptation of giving in. Giving in meant only one solution. It meant that she, Patricia Adair, would marry Lawrence Blake. Oh! it was impossible—impossible!—the man she had over and over again asserted that she hated, and declared she would kill. Then why was there any difficulty? Why this growing sense of a problem she could not solve?