This finished Paddy, and with a hasty farewell she sped off to the beach for her first sail; later on in the day writing Jack a long epistle upon Robert Morony and the church restoration, which Jack read lying at full-length on his back on the grass a month later; and his shouts of laughter brought his colleagues round to beg a share of the fun.
Two days later Eileen and her mother left for Dublin, and Paddy became the spoiled darling of the Parsonage.
She went everywhere just as of old, and though for a little while she avoided Mourne Lodge, not wishing to meet Lawrence, she soon found her strategic position untenable, and was obliged to yield to the insistent persuasions of Kathleen and Doreen, who began to look genuinely puzzled and distressed over her extraordinary reluctance to visit them.
Then she decided to take the bull by the horns, and instead of putting their first encounter off any longer, seek it purposely, and get it over. With this end in view she bicycled to Mourne Lodge, in a more or less ferocious frame of mind, once more to confound the enemy. As it happened, however, the enemy had seen fit to change its tactics, and instead of the new graciously polite Lawrence, there was only the old casual, indifferent looker-on. Paddy, with all her artillery in readiness, was for once non-plussed. “How do, Paddy!” he said coolly, when he joined them at tea, and sat down as far from her as possible, and commenced playing with his dogs, taking no further notice. Of course it is one thing to have all your guns in readiness and get a few good round shots in, and quite another to be calmly and loftily ignored, and Paddy’s instant impulse was to hurl every portable article within reach at his head. To make matters worse, she was furiously aware that she had blushed crimson when he first appeared, and that he had probably seen it, and drawn his own conclusions. To show him she did not care, she fired one or two shots at him at random, but the result, as she ought to have foreseen, was only a further assumption of the very indifference that irritated her. He looked at her as if she were not there, and maintained, for the most part, his habitual silence.
Neither did it prove to be for that day only, but each time she came. There was just a casual greeting, and then silence, and he declined all part in their daily excursions.
Paddy told herself she was relieved he had at last realised it was useless to try and make friends; but at the same time it was rather dull without Jack, or Eileen, as she could not always be off to friends, and she almost wished they could have just one battle-royal to liven things up a little. It was all very well to have no parleying with the enemy, but that did not mean one would be content to sit down quietly in sight of the enemy’s lines, and never so much as fire a shot; certainly not for an Irish Fusilier’s daughter. She was vaguely wishing for this encounter the day she paddled about alone in Jack’s little skiff, because it had been too wet to bicycle to Newry, and she looked a little doleful, until another skiff, impelled by long, smooth strokes came out of the sunlight and drew near.
She watched it coming, admiring the long, even strokes, and wondering a little fitfully, who was its occupant. As it came nearer, she recognised Lawrence’s thin profile, and lean, muscular figure, she felt a sudden quickening of her pulse, and a half hope that there was a chance of a skirmish. Or would he row straight past and merely throw her a casual greeting?
On and on came the skiff, and still the long even strokes—evidently he was going straight by. Two strokes away, however, he suddenly stopped pulling and leaned on his oars. The boat drifted up beside hen. Paddy got her guns ready.
“Hullo!” he said casually. “I thought you were playing in the tennis tournament this afternoon.”
“I was knocked out first round,” trying to speak as casually as he, but with a sudden inflection of regret she could not wholly stifle.