Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.
“Do you think,” he begged again, trembling, “that it is going to last much longer?”
She smiled, and bending her head slowly, kissed him.
“It is going to last—always,” she said.
A SOURCE OF IRRITATION
By STACY AUMONIER
To look at old Sam Gates you would never suspect him of having nerves. His sixty-nine years of close application to the needs of the soil had given him a certain earthy stolidity. To observe him hoeing, or thinning out a broad field of turnips, hardly attracted one’s attention, he seemed so much part and parcel of the whole scheme. He blended into the soil like a glorified swede. Nevertheless, the half-dozen people who claimed his acquaintance knew him to be a man who suffered from little moods of irritability.
And on this glorious morning a little incident annoyed him unreasonably. It concerned his niece, Aggie. She was a plump girl with clear, blue eyes, and a face as round and inexpressive as the dumplings for which the county was famous. She came slowly across the long sweep of the downland and, putting down the bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief which contained his breakfast and dinner, she said:
“Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”
Now, this may not appear to the casual reader to be a remark likely to cause irritation, but it affected old Sam Gates as a very silly and unnecessary question. It was, moreover, the constant repetition of it which was beginning to anger him. He met his niece twice a day. In the morning she brought his bundle of food at seven, and when he passed his sister’s cottage on the way home to tea at five she was invariably hanging about the gate, and she always said in the same voice: