"Do ye know," she said, wistfully, "I took the road, thinking I could mend trouble for that other lad; and instead it's trouble I've been making for every one--ye, Joseph, and I don't know how many more. And instead of doling kindness--why, I'm begging it. Now what's the meaning of it all? What keeps me failing?"
"'There's a divinity that shapes'--" began the tinker.
But Patsy cut him short. "Ye do know Willie Shakespeare!"
He smiled, guiltily. "I'm afraid I do--known him a good many years."
"He's grand company; best I know, barring tinkers." She turned impulsively and, standing on tiptoe, her fingers reached to the top of his shoulders. "See here, lad, ye can just give over thinking I'll go on alone. If I'm cast for melodrama, sure I'll play it according to the best rules; the villain has fled, the hero is hurt, and if I went now I'd be hissed by the gallery. I've got ye into trouble and I'll not leave ye till I see ye out of it--someway. Oh, there's lots of ways; I'm thinking them fast. Like as not a passing team or car would carry ye to Arden; or we might beg the loan of a horse for a bit from some kind-hearted farmer, and I could drive ye over and bring the horse back; or we'll ask a corner for ye at a farm-house till ye are fit to walk--"
"We are in the wrong part of the country for any of those things to happen. Look about! Don't you see what a very different road it is from the one we took in the beginning?"
Patsy looked and saw. So engrossed had she been in the incidents of the last hour or more that she had not observed the changing country. Here were no longer pastures, tilled fields, houses with neighboring barn-yards, and unclaimed woodland; no longer was the road fringed with stone walls or stump fencing. Well-rolled golf-links stretched away on either hand as far as they could see; and, beyond, through the trees, showed roofs of red tile and stained shingle; and trimmed hedges skirted everything.
"'Tis the rich man's country," commented Patsy.
"It is, and I'd crawl into a hole and starve before I'd take charity from one of them."
"Sure and ye would. When a body's poor 'tis only the poor like himself he'd be asking help of. Don't I know! What's yonder house?" She broke off with a jerk and pointed ahead to a small building, sitting well back from the road, partly hidden in the surrounding clumps of trees.