'What, you love plums more than Aunt Dora?'
'No—o,' said Sandy dubiously, 'but plums is good!'
And, with a sigh of reminiscence, he threw himself back in his father's arm, being, in fact, tired after his bad night and the further excitement of the 'pie.' The thumb slipped into the pink mouth, and with the other hand the child began dreamily to pull at one of his fair curls. The attitude meant going to sleep, and David had, in fact, hardly settled him, and drawn a light overcoat which lay near over his small legs, before the fringed eyelids sank.
David held him tenderly, delighting in the weight, the warmth, the soft even breath of his sleeping son. He managed somehow to relight his pipe, and then sat on, dreamily content, enjoying the warm September sunshine, and letting the book he had brought out lie unopened.
The garden in which he sat was an oblong piece of ground, with a central grass plat and some starved and meagre borders on either hand. The gravel in the paths had blackened, so had the leaves of the privets and the lilacs, so also had the red-brick walls of the low homely house closing up the other end of the garden. Seventy years ago this house had stood pleasantly amid fields on the northern side of Manchester; its shrubs had been luxuriant, its roses unstained. Now on every side new houses in oblong gardens had sprung up, and the hideous smoke plague of Manchester had descended on the whole district, withering and destroying.
Yet David had a great affection for his house, and it deserved it. It had been built in the days when there was more elbow-room in the world than now. The three sitting-rooms on the ground floor opened sociably into each other, and were pleasantly spacious, and the one story of bedrooms above contained, at any rate in the eyes of the tenants of the house, a surprising amount of accommodation. When all was said, however, it remained, no doubt, a very modest dwelling, at a rent of somewhere about ninety pounds a year; but as David sat contemplating it this afternoon, there rose in him again the astonishment with which he had first entered upon it, astonishment that he, David Grieve, should ever have been able to attain to it.
'Sandy! come here directly! Where are you, sir?'
David heard the voice calling in the hall, and raised his own.
'Lucy! all right!—he's here.'
The glass door opened, and Lucy came out. She was very smartly arrayed in a new blue dress which she had donned since dinner; yet her looks were cross and tired.