The Brambleside Inn lost one of its guests at an inconceivably early hour the morning after Patsy O’Connell unexpectedly filled Miss St. Regis’s engagement there. The guest departed by way of the second-floor piazza and a fire-escape, and not even the night watchman saw her go. But it was not until she had put a mile or more of open country between herself and the Inn that Patsy indulged in the freedom of a long breath. T he “After this I’ll keep away from inns and such like; ’tis too wit-racking to make it anyways comfortable. I feel now as if I’d been caught lifting the crown jewels, instead of giving a hundred-guinea performance for the price of a night’s bed and board and coming away as poor as a tinker’s ass.” A smile caught at the corners of her mouth—a twitching, memory smile. She was thinking of the note she had left folded in with the green-and-gold [Pg 49]gown in Miriam St. Regis’s trunk. In it she had stated her payment of one Irish grandfather by the name of Denis—in return for the loan of the dress—and had hoped that Miriam would find him handy on future public occasions. Patsy could not forbear chuckling outright—the picture of anything so unmitigatedly British as Miriam St. Regis with an Irish ancestor trailing after her for the rest of her career was too entrancing. [Pg 49] An early morning wind was blowing fresh from the clover-fields, rose-gardens, and new-leafed black birch and sassafras. Such a well-kept, clean world of open country it looked to Patsy as her eye followed the road before her, on to the greening meadows and wooded slopes, that her heart joined the chorus of song-sparrow and meadow-lark, who sang from the sheer gladness of being a live part of it all. She sighed, not knowing it. “Faith! I’m wishing ’twas more nor seven miles to Arden. I’d like to be following the road for days and days, and keeping the length of it between Billy Burgeman and myself.” Starting before the country was astir, she had met no one of whom she could inquire the way. A less adventuresome soul than Patsy might have sat herself down and waited for direction; but [Pg 50]that would have meant wasting minutes—precious minutes before the dawn should break and she should be no longer sole possessor of the road and the world that bounded it. So Patsy chose the way for herself—content that it would lead her to her destination in the end. The joy of true vagabondage was
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