So Pat quickly forgot Angeline's insults, her abused stomach and her empty pocketbook in a happy anticipation of the day in the woods at Hill-top with the boys and girls who were her "really worth-while friends."
CHAPTER XVIII
FOR HIS COUNTRY
"Paddy! Pad-dy Quinn! You get right straight out of there!" The cry came from Sheila. Returning from school she had spied, as she turned into her walk, Paddy digging among her mother's precious tulips.
Sheila threw her books inside the kitchen door, taking pains to notice that the room was empty, and then went back to punish the culprit. Paddy lay crouched on the ground watching her with bright eyes and wagging his stub of a tail in a way that was anything but repentant!
Perhaps the only thing that Mrs. Quinn loved more than Paddy, except of course her Sheila and her Denny and her Matt and her Dare, were the bulbs that grew each spring in the little border bed along the old fence. Her tulips always put their tiny green leaves up through the earth long before any other tulips; they were always bigger and brighter and seemed almost human, the way they nodded on their silvery green stalks and leaned toward one another as though repeating, like old gossips the stories the robins sang over their heads. Each fall Mrs. Quinn carefully covered them over and each spring, at the first feel of warmth in the sunshine, she watched daily for the tiny green tips, as a mother might watch for the return of a long absent son.
The children shared her interest, too--they could not be her children if they did not love the flowers and birds and sunshine that made their living joyous! The fairy stories she had taught them in their babyhood, as she had rocked them in her loving arms, had made the familiar things about them have a magic of their own; the old clock in the corner was not ugly because elves lived in it by day and pranced from its old case at night; a fairy princess had her fairy-palace in the nearby tree tops, a prince hid in the wood box, the nodding posies that always budded and grew wherever Mrs. Quinn lived, were the souls of sprites and at night danced about under the star-light; the dew that could be found on the blades of grass in the early morning were the jewels that they dropped in their haste to flee back to hiding from the approaching dawn!
Trouble had been a frequent visitor in this magic household but the only mark it ever left was an added line in the corner of Mrs. Quinn's smiling lips, made by long night struggles over the dilapidated book which contained the family accounts. Even when left a widow with four children to bring up, she did not lose one bit of the optimism that, years before, had made the whole world her Denny's and hers for the conquering! Her Denny had been taken from her before any one of the dreams they had dreamed had come true; still, for her, he lived on in her Sheila and the three small boys who had red hair and blue eyes like the father, and she still dreamed the old dreams for them. "There was no cloud so dark but that it had its bright lining somewhere" was the brave philosophy with which she directed her household, and the meals that were often frugal she made cheery with some loving nonsense. The sacrifices Sheila had to make as she grew older were nothing because she knew her mother made them, too, and there was comfort in the sense of sharing. The summer before Mrs. Quinn had taken the old brick house, fashionable in its day, comfortable now, even in its shabbiness, and had rented its rooms to lodgers. With careful economy this slender income would keep them comfortable until the day, to which Sheila always looked forward, when she herself could earn money and give to the boys the advantages of education that she would not ask for herself. To her her own little ambitions were as nothing compared to the big things that must be done for the boys so that they would grow into great men!
Paddy had become, immediately upon his adoption, a favored member of the family. He had privileges, too, and these increased as he willed because, from the mother down, not one of them could speak crossly to what little Dare called "the orphing dog." He slept in a box near the stove when he was not stretched across the foot of one of the boy's beds; he ate from a plate under the chair in the corner, a spot of his own choosing, from which he could watch the course of the family meal and ask for a second helping when he wished. He shared the rise and fall of the family fortunes--a bit of liver when the rest had chicken, a good bone on a holiday, a new collar when Matt found, on the walk before the house, a crisp five-dollar bill that had no owner.
Though, as a dog--especially an "orphing" dog Paddy measured in good manners up to the average, he had occasionally, during the winter, fallen into deep disgrace. Time and again he had been found digging vigorously in the back yard. Both Mrs. Quinn and Sheila had protested violently! The bulbs were there and, too, it was Sheila's precious war-garden--the best in the troop! Paddy had been punished--severely for the Quinns; in spite of this he was found again and again at his mischief.