“We’re all right, mother,” came back the answer cheerily; but as he came up, overcome at last, Mrs Blake fainted into his arms.
CHAPTER XXXVII
“Stay here with me.”
Paddy lay on the drawing-room sofa at the Parsonage and watched the birds skimming over the loch with a strained, anxious expression in her usually laughing eyes. Her aunts had fetched her from Mourne Lodge that morning, and there had been a great scene of general weeping and embracing and exclaiming. The news had somehow got all round the neighbourhood in an incredibly short time, and when Miss Mary was watching casually for Paddy to come home on her bicycle about eleven, there came instead a boy with the news that she and Lawrence had been lost in the fog all night and carried home in the morning.
Instantly there was great consternation in the Parsonage, and the small boy sent flying off for the one conveyance available in Omeath, in which, immediately afterward, the two sisters set out for Mourne Lodge. They found Paddy still a little dazed and shaken, but otherwise none the worse for her adventure.
“Lawrence saved me,” she said as soon as they gave her time to speak. “If it had not been for him, I should probably have died of cold. He risked his life for me.”
That was quite enough, and away rushed Miss Jane, with Miss Mary hurrying after her, to look for Lawrence. They found him in his den, with newspapers lying round him, apparently reading calmly. Only could they have looked in unobserved a moment sooner, they would have seen the newspapers were all out of reach, and, with compressed lips and knitted forehead he was staring gloomily at the floor lost in thought. However, he heard footsteps, and snatched up a paper just as the door opened, and neither of them had good enough eyesight to see that the sheet he held before him was covered with advertisements for housemaids and cooks.
Miss Jane came up to him with an almost sublime expression of gratitude.
“Paddy says you saved her life, Lawrence,” she said simply. “I feel as if I must go down on my knees to you.”
“Pray don’t,” he answered in his usual manner. “I won’t answer for the floor being particularly clean. I simply hate the room being dusted, you know.”