“I know you will, but it isn’t much I want—only that I am going back to London to-night, and I want you to help me manage it without any more questions and explanations than can possibly be helped.”
At first, Eileen was dumbfounded and greatly distressed, but Paddy was evidently desperately in earnest and meant to go.
“Don’t ask me anything, Eily, if you really want to help,” she said wearily. “Just break it to mother and the aunties a little while before I start and help to arrange some excuse for me to any others who ask questions.”
In the end it was all managed so, and Jack prepared to go to Greenore with her and see her safely on the boat for Holyhead, from whence she would go straight back to her uncle’s.
At the last moment Aunt Jane stole softly into her bedroom—Aunt Jane, whose heart had always leaned to Paddy, just as Aunt Mary’s had leaned to Eileen.
“My child,” she said very tenderly, “I can see that you are in some great trouble, and I shall not know how to keep from fretting about you, because you have always been as my own child to me, and I would rather suffer myself than see you suffer. Only we may not choose who shall be glad and who sad, and no doubt if we could, things would only be worse in the end. But you won’t forget your ‘old maid’ auntie by the loch, darling, whose heart will ache silently, thinking of you day and night.”
The tears gushed from Paddy’s eyes, and for a moment she seemed about to break down altogether, but in a few minutes she had managed to pull herself together again.
“Are you sure you must go away alone like this?” Aunt Jane asked yearningly.
“Yes, auntie, quite sure. I love you so much for coming to me now, but you mustn’t make me break down. Please help me to keep up, auntie, just until I get away.”
And Miss Jane did—having her own cry out later by herself—while the steamer started into the black, wintry night, and Jack stood watching it from Greenore pier, with a mist before his eyes and a queer huskiness in his throat. Just when life was opening for him with all its sweetest and best, it seemed hard, indeed, that Paddy—his old chum and playmate—should be assailed with this trouble of which she would not speak, and in which apparently none of them could help her. Jack cared just as much as his present happiness made it possible for him to care about anything. Long ago, though he only remembered it with a smile, the sole problem of his life had been which of the sisters he loved the best. Fate had tipped the balance to the elder’s side, without in any measure depreciating the other; but Jack never knew, and never would know, what a difference that final choice had made to Paddy.