She stood in a well-remembered thicket of willows. A few steps away was a footpath—how it all came back to her!—winding among the willows. Clasping Honey-Sweet close, Anne walked a little way down the path. Then she turned and looked back. The train was puffing and panting, lights were gleaming from its windows. There sat Mrs. Marshall, coaxing Dunlop, and there was Arthur cuddled in Martha's lap.
As Anne looked, the train moved slowly away, gathering speed as it went. Its lights gleamed and faded in the darkness. It was gone. She gazed after it, with a queer tightness about her throat. Then she walked steadily down the footpath, across the meadow, through a gate, and along the hillside. On top of that tree-clad hill was her old home. From one well-remembered room, flickered lights that seemed to beckon and summon the homesick child.
CHAPTER XIX
Meanwhile, Anne was the innocent cause of trouble between Pat and his father. Mr. Patterson came back in the early summer to spend a few weeks with his son at the old home in Georgetown before midsummer heat drove them to mountains or seashore.
The mansion was a roomy, old-fashioned house which his grandfather Patterson had built when Georgetown was a fashionable suburb of the capital. As Washington grew, fashion favored other sections, and the stately homes of Georgetown were stranded among small shops and dingy tenements. Some old residents, the Pattersons among the number, clung to their homes.
Mr. Patterson had been little at home since his wife's death. Every nook and corner of the house, her pictures on the walls, her books on the shelves, her easy-chair beside the window, called her to mind. How lonely and sad he was! His son was little comfort to him in his loneliness. Except on their ocean voyage, Pat and his father had not been together for three years and they had grown apart. Pat was no longer just a merry little chap, ready for a romp with his father. He was a tall, overgrown lad, absorbed in the sports and work of his school-world, at a loss what to say to the silent, reserved business man who made such an effort to talk to him.
One day, as they sat together at a rather silent dinner, a sudden thought made Pat drop his salad fork and look up at his father. "When is Anne coming, father?" he asked. "Where's her school? and when is it out?"
"Anne? Anne who?" asked Mr. Patterson, blankly—for the moment forgetful of the child who had been a brief episode in his busy life.
"Why, Anne Lewis, of course—our little Anne," said Pat.