On fine days the husbandless wives organised picnics and boiled the kettle over a fire of twigs. On these occasions the arrangements were generally in the hands of a fat, jolly woman everyone called "Mrs. Pat." She it was who chose the site, built the fire with gipsy cunning, and cut the forked sticks on which the kettle hung. The meal over, Mrs. Pat would produce a blackened cigarette holder and sit and smoke with reflective enjoyment while she translated the rustling, furtive sounds of life in brake and hedge-row around them for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen. No one knew whence she had acquired such mysterious completeness of knowledge. It was as if an invisible side of her walked hand in hand with Nature; sap oozing from a bursting bud, laden bee or fallen feather, each was to Mrs. Pat the chapter of a vast romance: and if she bored anyone with her interpretation of it, they had only got to get up and go for a walk.
She had a niece staying with her, the fiancée of a Lieutenant in her husband's ship, a slim thing with blue eyes and a hint of the Overseas in the lazy, unstudied grace of her movements. She spoke sparingly, and listened to the conversation of the others with her eyes always on the distant grey shadow that was the sea. Thus the days passed.
In the evenings Betty read or knitted and inveigled her stout, kindly landlady into gossip on the threshold while she cleared away the evening meal, and so the morning of the ninth day found Betty staring out of her window, listening for the thrush to begin again its haunting, unfinished song.
An object moving rapidly along the top of the hedge that skirted the lane leading to the cottage caught her eye; she watched it until the hedge terminated, when it resolved itself into the top of Eileen Cavendish's hat. Her pretty face was pink with exertion and excitement, and she moved at a gait suggestive of both running and walking.
Betty greeted her at the gateway of her little garden, and her heart quickened as she ran to meet the bearer of tidings.
"My dear," gasped Mrs. Cavendish, "they're coming in this morning. Mrs. Monro—that's my landlady—has a brother in the town: I forget what he does there, but he always knows."
For an instant the colour ebbed from Betty's cheeks, and then her beating heart sent it surging back again.
"But——" she said. "Does that mean that our squadron is coming in?"
"Of course it does, silly! Get your hat quick, and we'll climb up to the top of the hill and see if we can get a glimpse of them coming in. You'll have plenty of time to get down again and powder your nose before your Bunje-man, or whatever you call him, can get ashore. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"
Together they toiled up the hill to the high stretch of moorland from which a view of the entrance to the Firth could be obtained.