"I believe in fairies," Miss Templeton rejoined, smiling indulgently as she looked at the fair face beside her. "What was the dream, dearie?"
Gladys laughed a little mischievously. "I don't quite know whether I ought to tell you," she said. "It might shock you."
"Perhaps I'm not so easily shocked as you imagine," Miss Templeton replied. "What was it?"
"Well!" Gladys began, flinging both arms round her aunt's neck and playing with the pleats in her blouse, "I dreamed that I was walking in the little wood at the end of the garden, and that the trees and flowers walked and talked with me. And we danced together—and, first of all, I had for my partner, a red rose—and then, an ash. They both made love to me, and squeezed my waist with their hot, fibrous hands. A poppy piped, a bramble played the concertina, and a lilac grew desperately jealous of me and tried to claw my hair. Then the dancing ceased, and I found myself in the midst of bluebells that shook their bells at me with loud trills of laughter. And out from among them, came a buttercup, pointing its yellow head at me. 'See! see,' it cried, 'what Gladys is carrying behind her. Naughty Gladys!' And trees and flowers—everything around me—shook with laughter. Then I grew hot and cold all over, and did not know which way to look for my confusion, till a willow, having compassion on me said, 'Take no notice of them! They don't know any better.'
"I begged him to explain to me why they were so amused, and he grew very embarrassed and uncomfortable, and stammered—oh! so funnily, 'Well if you really wish to know—it's a bud, a baby white rose, and it's clinging to your dress.'
"'A baby! A baby rose!' shrieked all the flowers.
"'And it means,' a bluebell said, stepping perkily out from amidst its fellows, 'that your lover is coming—your lover with a troll-le-loll-la—and—well, if you want to know more ask the gooseberries, the gooseberries that hang on the bushes, or the parsley that grows in the bed,'—and at that all the flowers and trees shrieked with laughter—'Ta-ta-tra-la-la'—and with my ears full of the rude laughter of the wood I awoke. What do you think of it? Isn't it rather a quaint mixture of the—of the sacred—at least the artistic—and the profane?"
"Quite so," said Miss Templeton with an amused chuckle, "but I shouldn't ask for an interpretation of it if I were you."
"Not for an interpretation of the trees and flowers?" Gladys asked innocently. "I'm sure trees and flowers have a special significance in dreams."
"Very well then, my dear, ask Mrs. Sprat."