With the realization that the tinker was gone, the empty house suddenly became oppressive. Patsy put down the photograph with a quick little sigh, and hunted up the breakfast-tray he had left spread and ready for her, carrying it out to the back porch. There in the open and the sunshine she ate, according to her own tabulation, three meals—a left-over supper, a breakfast, and the lunch which she was more than likely to miss later, She was in the midst of the lunch when an idea scuttled out of her inner consciousness and pulled at her immediate attention. She rose hurriedly and went inside. Room after room she searched, closet after closet.

In one she came upon a suit of familiar white flannels; and she passed them slowly—so slowly that her hands brushed them with a friendly little greeting. But the search was a barren one, and she returned to the porch as empty-handed and as mystified as she had left it; the heap of ashes on the hearth held no meaning for her, and consequently told no tales.

“’Tis plain enough what’s happened,” she said, soberly, to the sparrows who were skirmishing for crumbs. “Just as I said, he was fearsome of those constables, after all, and he’s escaped in my clothes!”

The picture of the tinker’s bulk trying to disguise itself behind anything so scanty as her shrunken garments proved too irresistible for her sense of humor; she burst into peal after peal of laughter which left her weak and wet-eyed and dispelled her loneliness like fog before a clearing wind.

“Anyhow, if he hasn’t worn them he’s fetched them away as a wee souvenir of an O’Connell; and if I’m to reach Arden in any degree of decency ’twill have to be in stolen clothes.”

But she did not go in the blue frock; the realization came to her promptly that that was no attire for the road and an unprotected state; she must go with dull plumage and no beguiling feathers. So she searched again, and came upon a blue-and-white “middy” suit and a dark-blue “Norfolk.” The exchange brought forth the veriest wisp of a sigh, for a woman’s a woman, on the road or off it; and what one has not a marked preference for the more becoming frock?

Patsy proved herself a most lawful housebreaker. She tidied up and put away everything; and the shutter having already been replaced over the broken window by the runaway tinker, she turned the knob of the Yale lock on the front door and put one foot over the threshold. It was back again in an instant, however; and this time it was no lawful Patsy that flew back through the hall to the mantel-shelf. With the deftness and celerity of a true housebreaker she de-framed the tinker and stuffed the photograph in the pocket of her stolen Norfolk.

“Sure, he promised his company to Arden,” she said, by way of stilling her conscience. Then she crossed the threshold again; and this time she closed the door behind her.

The sun was inconsiderately overhead. There was nothing to indicate where it had risen or whither it intended to set; therefore there was no way of Patsy’s telling from what direction she had come or where Arden was most likely to be found. She shook her fist at the sun wrathfully. “I’ll be bound you’re in league with the tinker; ’tis all a conspiracy to keep me from ever making Arden, or else to keep me just seven miles from it. That’s a grand number—seven.”

A glint of white on the grass caught her eye; she stooped and found it to be a diminutive quill feather dropped by some passing pigeon. It lay across her palm for a second, and then—the whim taking her—she shot it exultantly into the air. Where it fell she marked the way it pointed, and that was the road she took.

It was beginning to seem years ago since she had sat in Marjorie Schuyler’s den listening to Billy Burgeman’s confession of a crime for which he had not sounded in the least responsible. That was on Tuesday. It was now Friday—three days—seventy-two hours later. She preferred to think of it in terms of hours—it measured the time proportionally nearer to the actual feeling of it. Strangely enough, it seemed half a lifetime instead of half a week, and Patsy could not fathom the why of it. But what puzzled her more was the present condition of Billy Burgeman, himself. As far as she was concerned he had suddenly ceased to exist, and she was pursuing a Balmacaan coat and plush hat that were quite tenantless; or—at most—they were supported by the very haziest suggestion of a personality. The harder she struggled to make a flesh-and-blood man therefrom the more persistently did it elude her—slipping through her mental grasp like so much quicksilver. She tried her best to picture him doing something, feeling something—the simplest human emotion—and the result was an absolute blank.

And all the while the shadow of a very real man followed her down the road—a shadow in grotesquely flapping rags, with head flung back. A dozen times she caught herself listening for the tramp of his feet beside hers, and flushed hotly at the nagging consciousness that pointed out each time only the mocking echo of her own tread. Like the left-behind cottage, the road became unexpectedly lonely and discouraging.

“The devil take them both!” she sputtered at last. “When one man refuses to be real at all, and the other pesters ye with being too real—’tis time to quit their company and let them fetch up where and how they like.”

But an O’Connell is never a quitter; and deep down in Patsy’s heart was the determination to see the end of the road for all three of them—if fate only granted the chance.

She came to a cross-roads at length. She had spied it from afar and hailed it as the end of her troubles; now she would learn the right way to Arden. But Patsy reckoned without chance—or some one else. The sign-boards had all been ripped from their respective places on a central post and lay propped up against its base. There was little information in them for Patsy as she read: “Petersham, five miles; Lebanon, twelve miles; Arden, seven miles—”

The last sign went spinning across the road, and Patsy dropped on a near-by stone with the anguish of a great tragedian. “Seven miles—seven miles! I’m as near to it and I know as much about it as when I started three days ago. Sure, I feel like a mule, just, on a treadmill, with Billy Burgeman in the hopper.”

A feeling of utter helplessness took possession of her; it was as if her experiences, her actions, her very words and emotions, were controlled by an unseen power. Impulse might have precipitated her into the adventure, but since her feet had trod the first stretch of the road to Arden chance had sat somewhere, chuckling at his own comedy—making, while he pulled her hither and yon, like a marionette on a wire. Verily chance was still chuckling at the incongruity of his stage setting: A girl pursuing a strange man, and a strange sheriff pursuing the girl, and neither having an inkling of the pursuit or the reason for it.

On one thing her mind clinched fast, however: she would at least sit where she was until some one came by who could put her right, once and for all; rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief—she would stop whoever came first.

The arpeggio of an automobile horn brought her to her feet; the next moment the machine careened into sight and Patsy flagged it from the middle of the road, the lines of her face set in grim determination.

“Would you kindly tell me—” she was beginning when a girl in the tonneau cut her short:

“Why, it’s Patsy O’Connell! How in the name of your blessed Saint Patrick did you ever get so far from home?”

The car was full of young people, but the girl who had spoken was the only one who looked at all familiar. Patsy’s mind groped out of the present into the past; it was all a blind alley, however, and led nowhere.

The girl, seeing her bewilderment, helped her out. “Don’t you remember, I was with Marjorie Schuyler in Dublin when you were all so jolly kind to us? I’m Janet Payne—those awful ‘Spitsburger Paynes’”—and the girl’s laugh rang out contagiously.

The laugh swept Patsy’s mind out into the open. She reached out and gripped the girl’s hand. “Sure, I remember. But it’s a long way from Dublin, and my memory is slower at hearkening back than my heart. A brave day to all of you.” And her smile greeted the carful indiscriminately.

“Oh!”—the girl was apologetic—“how beastly rude I am! I’m forgetting that you don’t know everybody as well as everybody knows you. Jean Lewis, Mrs. Dempsy Carter, Dempsy Carter, Gregory Jessup, and Jay Clinton—Miss Patricia O’Connell, of the Irish National Players. We are all very much at your service—including the car, which is not mine, but the Dempsy Carters’.”

“Shall we kidnap Miss O’Connell?” suggested the owner. “She appears an easy victim.”

Janet Payne clapped her hands, but Patsy shook a decided negative. “That’s the genius of the Irish,” she laughed; “they look easy till you hold them up. I’m bound for Arden, and must make it by the quickest road if you’ll point it out to me.”

“Why, of course—Arden; that accounts for you perfectly. Stupid that I didn’t think of it at once. What part are you playing?” Janet Payne accompanied the question with unmistakable eagerness.

Patsy shot a shrewd glance at the girl. Was she indulging in good-natured banter, or had she learned through Marjorie Schuyler of Patsy’s self-imposed quest, and was seeking information in figurative speech? Patsy decided in favor of the former and answered it in kind: “Faith! I’m not sure whether I’ve been cast for the duke’s daughter—or the fool. I can tell ye better after I reach Arden.” And she turned abruptly as if she would be gone.

But the girl held her back. “No, you don’t. We are not going to lose you like that. We’ll kidnap you, as Dempsy suggested, till after lunch; then we’ll motor you back to Arden. You’ll get there just about as soon.”

Patsy had not the slightest intention of yielding; her mind and her feet were braced against any divergence from the straight road now; but the man Janet Payne had called Gregory Jessup said something that scattered her resolutions like so much chaff.

“You’ve simply got to come, Miss O’Connell.” And he leaned over the side of the car in boyish enthusiasm. “Last summer Billy Burgeman used to read to me the parts of Marjorie’s letters that told about you, and they were great! We were making up our minds to go to Ireland and see if you were real when your company came to America. After that Marjorie would never introduce us after the plays, just to be contrary. You wouldn’t have the heart to grudge us a little acquaintanceship now, would you?”

“Billy Burgeman,” repeated Patsy. “Do you know him?”

Dempsy Carter interposed. “They’re chums, Miss O’Connell. I’ll wager there isn’t a soul on earth that knows Billy as well as Greg does.”

“That’s hard on Marjorie, isn’t it?” asked Janet Payne.

“Oh, hang Marjorie!” The sincerity of Gregory Jessup’s emotion somewhat excused his outburst.

“Why, I thought they were betrothed!” Patsy looked innocent.

“They were. What they are now—Heaven only knows! Marjorie Schuyler has gone to China, and Billy has dropped off the face of the earth.”

A sudden silence fell on the cross-roads. It was Patsy who broke it at last. “Well?” A composite, interrogative stare came from the carful. Patsy laughed bewitchingly. “For a crowd of rascally kidnappers, you are the slowest I ever saw. Troth, in Ireland they’d have it done in half the time.”

The next instant Patsy was lifted bodily inside, and, amid a general burst of merriment, the car swung down the road.

It was a picnic lunch—an elaborate affair put up in a hamper, a fireless cooker, and a thermos basket; and it was spread on a tiny, fir-covered peninsula jutting out into a diminutive lake. It was an enchanting spot and a delicious lunch, with good company to boot; but, to her annoyance, Patsy found herself continually comparing it unfavorably with a certain vagabond breakfast garnished with yellow lady’s-slippers, musicianed by throstles, and served by a tinker.

“Something is on your mind, or do you find our American manners and food too hard to digest comfortably?” Gregory Jessup had curled up unceremoniously at her feet, balancing a caviar sandwich, a Camembert cheese, and a bottle of ale with extraordinary dexterity.

“I was thinking about—Billy Burgeman.”

He cast a furtive look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: “I can’t talk Billy with the others; I’m too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy’s character and motives.” He stopped abruptly and scanned Patsy’s face. “I believe a chap could turn his mind inside out with you, though, and you’d keep the contents as faithfully as a safe-deposit vault.”

Patsy smiled appreciatively. “Faith! you make me feel like Saint Martin’s chest that Satan himself couldn’t be opening.”

“What did he have in it?”

“Some good Christian souls.”

“Contents don’t tally—mine are some very un-Christian thoughts.” He abandoned the sandwich and cheese, and settled himself to the more serious business of balancing his remarks. “Billy and I work for the same engineering firm; he walked out for lunch Tuesday and no one has seen him since—unless it’s Marjorie Schuyler. Couldn’t get anything out of the old man when I first went to see him, and now he’s too ill to see any one. Marjorie said she really didn’t know where he was, and quit town the next day. Now maybe they don’t either of them know what’s happened any more than I do; but I think it’s infernally queer for a man to disappear and say nothing to his father, the girl he’s engaged to, or his best friend. Don’t you?”

Patsy’s past training stood stanchly by her. She played the part of the politely interested listener—nothing more—and merely nodded her head.

“You see,” the man went on, “Billy has a confoundedly queer sense of honor; he can stretch it at times to cover nearly everybody’s calamities and the fool shortcomings of all his acquaintances. Why, it wasn’t a month ago a crowd of us from the works were lunching together, and the talk came around to speculating. Billy’s hard against it on principle, but he happened to say that if he was going in for it at all he’d take cotton. What was in Billy’s mind was not the money in it, but the chance to give the South a boost. Well, one of the fellows took it as a straight tip to get rich from the old man’s son and put in all he had saved up to be married on; lost it and squealed. And Billy—the big chump—claimed he was responsible for it—that, being the son of his father, he ought to know enough to hold his tongue on some subjects. He made it good to the fellow. I happen to know, for it took every cent of his own money and his next month’s salary into the bargain—and that he borrowed from me.”

“Wouldn’t his father have helped him out?”

Gregory Jessup gave a bitter little laugh. “You don’t know the old man or you wouldn’t ask. He is just about as soft-hearted and human as a Labrador winter. I’ve known Billy since we were both little shavers—and, talk about the curse of poverty! It’s a saintly benediction compared to a fortune like that and life with the man who made it.”

“And—himself, Billy—what does he think of money?”

“I’ll tell you what he said once. He had dropped in late after a big dinner where he had been introduced to some one as the fellow who was going to inherit sixty millions some day. Phew! but he was sore! He walked miles—in ten-foot laps—about my den, while he cursed his father’s money from Baffin Bay to Cape Horn. ‘I tell you, Greg,’ he finished up with, ‘I want enough to keep the cramps out of life, that’s all; enough to help the next fellow who’s down on his luck; enough to give the woman I marry a home and not a residence to live in, and to provide the father of my kiddies with enough leisure for them to know what real fatherhood means. I bet you I can make enough myself to cover every one of those necessities; as for the millions, I’d like to chuck them for quoits off the Battery.’”

For a moment Patsy’s eyes danced; but the next, something tumbled out of her memory and quieted them. “Then why in the name of Saint Anthony did he choose to marry Marjorie Schuyler?”

“That does seem funny, I know, but that’s a totally different side of Billy. You see, all his life he’s been falling in with people who made up to him just for his money, and his father had a confounded way of reminding him that he was bound to be plucked unless he kept his wits sharp and distrusted every one. It made Billy sick, and yet it had its effect. He’s always been mighty shy with girls—reckon his father brought him up on tales of rich chaps and modern Circes. Anyway, when he met Marjorie Schuyler it was different—she had too much money of her own to make his any particular attraction, and he finally gave in that she liked him just for himself. That was a proud day for him, poor old Bill!”

“And did she—could she really love him?” Patsy asked the question of herself rather than the man beside her.

But he answered it promptly: “I don’t believe Marjorie Schuyler has anything to love with; it was overlooked when she was made. That’s what’s worrying me. If he’s got into a scrape he’d tell Marjorie the first thing; and she’s not the understanding, forgiving kind. He hasn’t any money; he wouldn’t go to his father; and because he’s borrowed from me once, he’s that idiotic he wouldn’t do it again. If Marjorie has given him his papers he’s in a jolly blue funk and perfectly capable of going off where he’ll never be heard of again. Hang it all! I don’t see why he couldn’t have come to me?”

Patsy said nothing while he replenished her plate and helped himself to another sandwich. At last she asked, casually, “Did the two of you ever have a disagreement over Marjorie Schuyler?”

“He asked me once just what I thought of her, and I told him. We never discussed her again.”

“No?” Inwardly Patsy was tabulating why Billy Burgeman had not gone to his friend when Marjorie Schuyler failed him. He would hardly have cared to criticize the shortcomings of the girl he loved with the man who had already discovered them.

“What are you two jabbering about?” Janet Payne had left her group and the hectic argument over fashions.

“Sure, we’re threshing out whether it’s the Irish or the suffragettes will rule England when the war is over.”

“Well, which is it?”

“Faith! the answer’s so simple I’m ashamed to give it. The women will rule England—that’s an easy matter; but the Irish will rule the women.”

“Then you are one of the old-fashioned kind who approves of a lord and master?” Gregory Jessup looked up at her quizzically.

“’Tis the new fashion you’re meaning; having gone out so long since, ’tis barely coming in yet. I’d not give a farthing for the man who couldn’t lead me; only, God help him! if he ever leaves his hands off the halter.”

The laugh that followed gave Patsy time to think. There was one more question she must be asking before the others joined them and the conversation became general. She turned to Janet Payne with a little air of anxious inquiry.

“Maybe you’d ask the rascally villain who kidnapped me, when he has it in his mind to keep his promise and fetch me to Arden?”

As the girl left them Patsy turned toward Gregory Jessup again and asked, softly: “Supposing Billy Burgeman has fallen among strangers? If they saw he was in need of friendliness, would it be so hard to do him a kindness?”

The man shook his head. “The hardest thing in the world. Billy Burgeman has been proud and lonely all his life, and it’s an infernal combination. You may know he’s out and out aching for a bit of sympathy, but you never offer it; you don’t dare. We could never get him to own up as a little shaver how neglected and lonely he was and how he hated to stay in that horrible, gloomy Fifth Avenue house. It wasn’t until he had grown up that he told me he used to come and play as often as they would let him—just because mother used to kiss him good-by as she did her own boys.”

Gregory Jessup looked beyond the firs to the little lake, and there was that in his face which showed that he was wrestling with a treasured memory. When he spoke again his voice sounded as if he had had to grip it hard against a sign of possible emotion.

“You know Billy’s father never gave him an allowance; he didn’t believe in it—wouldn’t trust Billy with a cent. Poor little shaver—never had anything to treat with at school, the way the rest of the boys did; and never even had car-fare—always walked, rain or shine, unless his father took him along with him in the machine. Billy used to say even in those days he liked walking better. Mother died in the winter—snowy time—when Billy was about twelve; and he borrowed a shovel from a corner grocer and cleared stoops all afternoon until he’d made enough to buy two white roses. Father hadn’t broken down all day—wouldn’t let us children show a tear; but when Billy came in with those roses—well, it was the children who finally had to cheer father up.”

Patsy sprang to her feet with a little cry. “I must be going.” She turned to the others, a ring of appeal in her voice. “Can’t we hurry a bit? There’s a deal of work at Arden to be done, and no one but myself to be doing it.”

“Rehearsals?” asked Janet Payne.

And Patsy, unheeding, nodded her head.

There was a babel of nonsense in the returning car. Patsy contributed her share the while her mind was busy building over again into a Balmacaan coat and plush hat the semblance of a man.

“Sure, I’m not saying I can make out his looks or the color of his eyes and hair, but he’s real, for all that. Holy Saint Patrick, but he’s a real man at last, and I’m liking him!” She smiled with deep contentment.