Paddy-The-Next-Best-Thing. Gertrude Page
she said, glancing down at her dripping skirt, and the streams of water all round.
“A little damp!” he suggested, and they laughed again. “But you must be awfully plucky and awfully rash,” he added, not without admiration.
“Oh, yes! I’m all that,” asserted Paddy; “but I’ve got a charmed life, so it doesn’t matter. I must look perfectly awful, though,” and she laughed again.
“Not at all,” gallantly; “but I’m afraid you’ll take cold. Do you live near?”
“Only at Omeath, but we shall have to tack, so it will take rather a long time.”
“I should think so,” impressively. “We’ll go into Carlingford, and I’ll take you to my aunt’s to get some dry clothes.”
“Who is your aunt?” asked Paddy, inwardly admiring the skill with which he managed his boat; and not a little also his broad shoulders and frank, pleasant face.
“Mrs. Masterman, at Dunluce.”
“Goodness!” she exclaimed in surprise, without stopping to think. “Are you Colonel Masterman’s nephew who came yesterday?”
“Yes, why?” looking up curiously.
Paddy found herself in a fix, and she flushed crimson, feeling ready to bite her tongue out for being so hasty.
“Why?” he asked again, in a way that made her feel she must answer.
“Only that I heard something about you this afternoon,” she stammered.
“And what did you hear?”
His grey eyes had an amused twinkle in them now, and there was something so disarming about his smile; that with an answering twinkle in her own, Paddy looked at him slyly and said:
“Oh! nothing much—only that you bought picture post-cards.”
Chapter Five.
Ted Masterman.
“Was that all?” asked Ted Masterman, reaching across to tuck his rain-proof coat, which he fortunately had with him, closer round her, and looking still more amused.
“Not quite, but it’s all I’m going to tell you,” said Paddy.
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” with a smile; “you’re going to tell me the rest.”
“How do you know I am?” archly.
“Because people always have to do what I want them to.”
“How very odd!” in feigned surprise; “that is exactly how it is with me!”
“So I should imagine,” looking into her laughing eyes with growing interest.
“That’s pretty of you,” she said, “so I’ll go on. I was told you had a lovely smile.”
“Someone was a kindly judge then. I wonder what you said.”
The twinkle in Paddy’s eyes literally shone.
“I said that if you bought picture post-cards and had a lovely smile you must be a nincompoop.”
Ted threw his head back and shouted with laughter, exclaiming, “That’s the best of all, and I quite agree with you!” Then they ran up against the landing-stage, and he hurried her out of the boat and along the road to his aunt’s as fast as she would go.
“My dear child!” was all Mrs. Masterman said, when she saw her, and without another word bustled her off upstairs, and flew to prepare a hot bath.
“It’s nothing new,” she explained in answer to Ted’s queries later, shaking her head drolly. “She’s just the wildest harum-scarum that ever breathed, and her father positively delights in it. I must take you to call. He’ll laugh himself nearly ill over this escapade, but for my part, I think he would do better returning thanks for the multitudinous times she has been given back to him, from the very gates of death.”
“But she wouldn’t have been drowned to-day, aunt. She could have swum ashore.”
“She might have had cramp, or caught her death of cold, or a hundred other things. It’s dreadful, to my thinking, for a girl to be so absolutely a boy in everything. But there! she’s young yet, and I daresay she’ll improve by and by.”
Ted, standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, staring across the Loch, had an odd, inward conviction that there was no room for improvement, but this he kept to himself, asking instead of her father and home.
A little later, he made their acquaintance, as his aunt decided to keep Paddy all night, and sent him to The Ghan House with a note of explanation. Jack and Eileen were just returning from the Parsonage as he arrived, and while Mrs. Adair read the note aloud to the General, out on the lawn where they were sitting, the two young people sauntered up.
“Lord love us!” exclaimed the General gleefully; “was there ever such a girl before! Capsized, did she?—right out by Greenore!—managing the boat alone, too!—and out there a day like this—by my faith a good-plucked one! Here, Jack! you young scoundrel! why weren’t you out with Paddy this afternoon? Here she’s been getting capsized right out by Greenore and fished out of the water by this young man, while you were wasting cartridges trying to hit snipe.
“Here’s my hand, sir,” turning to Ted and giving him a hearty hand-shake, “and an old soldier’s thanks and blessing, and if there’s anything I can do for you at any time just name it. Lord! what a girl she is!” he finished, and held his sides and shook with laughter.
Meanwhile Mrs. Adair added her thanks in a low, eager voice, asking anxiously after Paddy’s welfare; and Jack took stock of the stranger generally.
When he had finished reassuring Mrs. Adair concerning her daughter, and reasserting that he had really done nothing at all deserving of thanks, Ted returned Jack’s scrutiny with almost as great interest, wondering if this handsome young Irishman were Paddy’s brother.
“Let me introduce you to my eldest daughter,” said Mrs. Adair. “Eileen, this is Mr. Masterman from Dunluce.”
Eileen shook hands with her usual charming smile, and then Mrs. Adair introduced Jack, who, after a little further scrutiny, started on his favourite topics of shooting and sailing, and finding Ted as interested as himself, they quickly became good friends.
“Your daughter called out something about returning in the morning,” Ted said to Mrs. Adair, as he prepared to leave. “Some fishermen have been out for the boat this afternoon, so very likely she will return in it.”
“Perhaps you will accompany her,” said Mrs. Adair at once. “We shall be delighted to see you to lunch if you will.”
Ted thanked her and accepted the invitation gladly, then hurried back with various portions of Paddy’s belongings to Carlingford, hoping vaguely that she might have insisted upon getting up and coming down to dinner. Manlike, he had quite forgotten she could hardly appear without a dress, and he felt quite unreasonably disappointed when he found the table only laid for three, and he and his uncle and aunt sat down together.
“I took the precaution of locking Paddy’s door,” Mrs. Masterman remarked, as they sat down. “I know what a terror she is to manage, and after such a wetting it is most important that she should remain in bed for the rest of the day.”
She had scarcely finished speaking when an apparition in the doorway, clothed in an assortment of odds and ends of borrowed garments, and with a face wreathed in smiles, remarked: “I wish roses hadn’t thorns. Coming down the spout was child’s play, but the beastly thorns on the rose creeper