Patsy listened impatiently to the parlor maid arguing the matter of
Billy's guilt with the butler. Their work was finished, and they were
passing through the kitchen on their way to the servants' hall.

"Of course he took it"--the maid's tone was positive--"those rich
men's sons always are a bad lot."

"'E didn't take it, then. 'Is father's playin' some mean game on
'im--that's what. Hi worked five months hin that 'ouse an' Hi'd as
lief work for the devil!" And the butler pounded his fist for
emphasis.

It took all Patsy's self-control to refrain from launching into the
argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself,
however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and
hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the
most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine
horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that
Patsy could recall with rapidity.

When the kitchen was empty once more Patsy systematically gathered
together all that she knew and all that she had heard of Billy
Burgeman, and weighed it against the bare possible chance she might
have of helping him should she continue her quest. And in the end she
made her decision unwaveringly.

"Troth! a conscience is a poor bit of property entirely," she sighed,
as she stood the pate-shells on the ledge of the range to dry. "It
drives ye after a man ye don't care a ha'penny about, and it drives
ye from the one that ye do. Bad luck to it!"

* * * * *

That night Patsy sat under the trees with the tinker while he ate his
supper. A half-grown moon lighted the feast for them, for Patsy took
an occasional mouthful at the tinker's insistence that dining alone
was a miserably unsociable affair.

"To watch ye eat that pate de fois gras a body would think ye had
been reared on them. Honest, now, have ye ever tasted one before in
your life?"

"I have."

"Then--ye have sat at rich men's tables?"

"Or perhaps I have begged at rich men's doors. Maybe that is how I
came to have a distaste for their--charity."

"Who are ye? Ye know I'd give the full of my empty pockets to know
who ye are, and what started ye tramping the road--in rags."

The tinker considered a moment. "Perhaps I took the road because I
believed it led to the only place I cared to find. Perhaps I lost the
way to it, as you lost yours to Arden, and in the losing I
found--something