“Twenty years!” murmured Grandma.
“Of course that’s exaggeration,” explained Berty, apologetically. “I know that you know I’m not twenty yet. I just wanted you to understand how glad I feel.”
“Go out on the veranda,” said Grandma, “and breathe the fresh air. You have been in the house too much with me lately.”
Berty’s upper lip was covered with a dew of perspiration. She was hot all the time, partly from excitement and anxiety about Grandma, and partly from her incessant activity in waiting on her in the heated atmosphere of the house.
Berty reluctantly made her way to the veranda, where she promptly dislodged from a rocking-chair the mongrel pup, who, after long hesitation, had finally chosen to take up his abode with her.
The pup, however, crawled up beside her after she sat down, and she gently swayed to and fro in the rocking-chair, absently stroking his head and gazing out at the stripped grain-fields across the river.
“The ripened sheaves are garnered in,
Garnered in, garnered in,”
she was singing softly to herself, when some one remarked in an undertone, “Well, how goes it?”
“Oh,” she said, looking up, “it is you, is it, the omnipresent Tom?”