“Do you know, Aunt Kate, sometimes I don’t know just what you’re talking about.”

“No?  Really?  And this from your sex to mine!”

“Do you always say what you mean, Aunt Kate?”

“Very seldom.”

“Why not?”

“Somebody might find out what I thought.”

“Don’t you want them to know what you think, Aunt Kate?” he pursued, making a complete revolution and for the instant evading the frisking puppy.

“Certainly not.”

“But why not, Aunt Kate?”—­squirming as the puppy placed a long warm lick right below the knee.

“Oh, I don’t know.”  The story was getting better.  Then, looking up with Kate’s queer smile:  “It might hurt their feelings.”

“Why would it—?”

“Oh, Wayneworth Jones!  Why were you born with your brain cells screwed into question marks?—­and why do I have to go through life getting them unscrewed?”

She actually read a paragraph; and as there she had to turn a page she looked over at Ann.  Ann’s puppy had joined Worth’s on the floor and together they were indulging in bites of puppyish delight at the little boy’s legs, at each other’s tails, at so much of the earth’s atmosphere as came within range of their newly created jaws craving the exercise of their function.  Mad with the joy of living were those two collie pups on that essentially live and joyous morning.

And Ann, if not mad with the joy of living, seemed sensible of the wonder of it.  “Days in Florence” open on her lap, hands loose upon it, she was looking off at the river.  From hard thoughts of other days Kate could see her drawn to that day—­its softness and sunshine, its breath of the river and breath of the trees.  Folded in the arms of that day was Ann just then.  The breeze stirred a little wisp of hair on her temple—­gently swayed the knot of ribbon at her throat.  The spring was wooing Ann; her face softened as she listened.  Was it something of that same force which bounded boisterously up in boy and dogs which was stealing over Ann—­softening, healing, claiming?

The next paragraph of the story on the printed page was less interesting.

“Aunt Kate,” said Worth, gathering both puppies into his arms as they were succeeding all too well in demonstrating that they were going to grow up and be real dogs, “Watts says it is the ungodliest thing he knows of that these puppies haven’t got any names.”

“I am glad to learn,” murmured Kate, “that Watts is a true son of the church.  He yearns for a christening?”

“He says that being as nobody else has thought up names for them, he calls the one that is most yellow, Mike; and the one that is most white, Pat.  Do you think Mike and Pat are pretty names, Aunt Kate?”

“Well, I can’t say that my esthetic sense fairly swoons with delight at sound of Mike and Pat,” she laughed.

“I’ll tell you, Worthie,” she suggested, looking up with twinkling eye after her young nephew had been experimenting with various intonations of Mike—­Pat, Pat—­Mike, “why don’t you call one of them Pourquoi?”