At last I tore myself away from the red-walled garden, and went and looked at the tubs full of geraniums and at the beds on the east side. How cool and happy they looked, and how grateful for the bountiful moisture they had received from hose and water-can. Drops glistened faintly on the stems, and the plants seemed to be drinking in the water with avidity. How good it was, accomplished work, and how sweet the stillness of a summer evening.
I stole back into the house and looked on the little table for the letters that had come by the second post. I found one from Mrs. Stanley. “I think,” she wrote “after all, that you and Bess have the best of it. For poor little Hals ever since he has been here has been poorly and ailing. Oh! why cannot children be well in London?”
I asked Bess the question, for she stood by me, about to say “good night” before going off to the little white cot upstairs.
“Why should poor children?” she answered, with a pout. “London is so dull.”
I kissed my little maid and said, “Then we must get Hals down here.”
At this Bess clapped her hands. “Of course we must,” she cried. “If people want to be happy, they should live at Wenlock.”
I sat down that evening and asked Mrs. Stanley to send her little boy down to us. “The country just now is so sweet and fresh that it must do him good,” I wrote. “We will take the greatest care of him; and here he has all the world to play in.” The next morning I told Bess what I had done.
“Yes,” repeated Bess, gravely, “all the world to play in, and that is what a poor boy can never have in London. There is no place there, excepting for motors and policemen.”
AFTER THE RAIN
All through the night sweet summer rain fell. How delightful a morning is after such rain. How happy every plant and leaf looked, how greedily all seemed to have drunk their fill—trees, shrubs, grass, and flowers. What an aspect of deep refreshment everything had, as if an elixir of life had been poured into the veins of every tree and herb.