CHAPTER XL
A Budget of News.
Paddy was out on the platform in half a twinkling, and with a little cry of “Jack!” darted to meet him with hands outstretched. Jack caught hold of both, and shook them until she was quite exhausted, and cried for mercy. Lawrence stood looking on, and his brow grew black as thunder. If Jack had only known it, in that one minute he had practically all the revenge he need wish, for any fancied contempt in the past.
“Can I give you a lift?” Lawrence said, when they would listen. “My motor is here. How do, O’Hara! You look as if South America suited you.”
“It did A1,” answered Jack, not even noticing Lawrence’s ill-concealed anger—as indeed he had small occasion to. “What shall we do, Paddy, walk or drive?”
“Oh, ride on the back of the train, of course!” she cried, “and home through the garden, just like we did as children. Oh, Jack, I’ve had to be so grown-up for two years. I absolutely refuse to be grown-up this Christmas holiday—we will—we must be children.”
“Anything you like,” he cried, with the utmost readiness. “Come along,” as the train moved. “Send up Miss Paddy’s portmanteau. Good-by, Lawrence!” and they sprang on to the step of the guard’s van and rode the short distance of railway to the Parsonage garden, leaving Lawrence to go home in the most unenviable frame of mind imaginable, which he later vented upon the household generally in his cold and cutting fashion, regardless of the fact that he was damping every one’s Christmas.
But what cared Jack and Paddy?—least of all Paddy—for whom a joy seemed to have dropped straight from, the skies. What a noise there was, to be sure! and how Jack and Paddy would talk at once, and make it impossible for any single sentence to be coherent.
At last, in desperation, Paddy picked up the little table-bell and rang it lustily. “If I can’t be heard, you shan’t, Jack,” she said, and, the moment he opened his mouth, started ringing it again. Jack immediately flew round the table to get the bell, and behold! if the two little ladies weren’t collecting the breakables again, and casting agonising glances at the cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table—just for all the world as if two long years of separation had not rolled by since the last scrimmage, and these two mad things were not a day older. If Paddy had not been in such a state of eager excitement, she must certainly have noticed sooner than she did an air of portent that still prevailed, as of some momentous event not yet revealed.
As it was, they all went to the little church as usual, Jack and the aunties sitting one side, and the Adairs on the other side, for the sake of old times; and came home again, and had their Christmas dinner, before Paddy got an inkling that further news was in the air. Up to then the whole conversation nearly had run upon Jack’s adventures in the Argentine, and she had plied him with such an endless string of questions that there had really not been much opportunity for any other subject.