We decided to walk down the shore road and call for Hattie May. She had been so disappointed at our failure to take her to Millport on Michael’s affair that we were anxious not to seem to slight her again. “But I’m not at all sure she’ll be good for the invalid,” Eve remarked. “She’s quite as likely as not to tell her she’s looking poorly or start talking about some lovely funeral she went to!”
We found her alone. “I’ve just finished a letter to Mother,” she said, “and I guess Hamish’ll be hearing from Dad before long!”
“You don’t mean he’s still acting strangely?”
“My dear, I scarcely see him at all except at meals and he won’t tell me a solitary thing!”
We caught the two o’clock bus from the square and at a little before three were opening the gate of the big stone house which Aunt Cal had described to us. Somewhat to my relief, we found the invalid much improved and sitting out in the sun. She welcomed us cordially and I guessed that she was pleased enough to have some one new to talk to. We chattered on, telling her about school, about Hamish’s fall into the well and about our discovery of the statue of Circe at the bottom of it.
“Dear me,” she exclaimed, “what a terrible experience for the poor boy. I wonder that he retained his reason, I’m sure I shouldn’t have!”
“I’m not a bit sure that he has,” Hattie May said feelingly, “at least not all of it. The way he acts!”
We laughed and Mrs. Viner said, “I remember so well when the old Captain—as we used to call him—first set up those statues in his garden. My, what a lot of talk it made!”
“You knew Aunt Cal when she was a girl, I suppose?” I said.
“Oh, dear, yes, we went to school together. At the old district school that was torn down when they put the state road through.”