"I'll find her for you!" Denis exclaimed, and brushed past her. When the door was shut, Sheila Pat, with a smile for what had occurred, went back to the window and her thoughts.
Jim crept stealthily down the curtain and across to the boot buttons, which had been scattered by Miss Kezia's angry toe. He picked them up, one by one, and laid them in a neat little row again. Then he sat and regarded them with his head on one side.
Sheila Pat's solitude was invaded presently by a very injured and tearful Molly.
"She thinks I'm mad! And he isn't worth it! I'm to—to sew them all on myself! I can't!"
Sheila Pat rose suddenly and left the room. She went into her bedroom.. It was a bright, cold day with a brilliant sun sparkling on a fast-disappearing frost. But Sheila Pat donned a dark blue raincoat. She looked down with satisfaction on the neat little ankles and feet that were all that emerged from that end. From the other end, above an intensely sporting turned-up collar, her small face looked out with a weighty seriousness. She put on a dark blue peaked sort of cap, also rain proof, slipped downstairs, and left the house. With her hands in big pockets, she walked staidly down the road, a quaint little exceedingly tailorish figure. She stopped to accost a grey cob in a milkman's cart, and on the milkman's appearing from a house fell into conversation with him. Suddenly she broke out, appealingly young and eager in spite of her coat:—
"Might I—oh, please might I get in and hold the reins while you're in the houses?"
He appeared to hesitate.
"It—" a little choke jostled the words—"it's weeks and weeks since I've held the reins!"
The milkman glanced dubiously down at the very small Atom, then at his quiet old cob, and assented. As he politely helped her in he felt the little tremor that shook her, but he did not understand it. He smiled surprisedly at the workmanlike way in which she gathered up the reins. He nodded kindly into the suddenly joyous face uplifted to his. Sheila Pat let out a great big breath and clucked softly to the cob.
"Plenty of work in him yet," she observed conversationally. "Pretty shrewd, too," with a proud little laugh as the cob stopped outside a house.