Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/22

14 retaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of restless and devastating mischief. Sometime, to make Sure that no one interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the doors could ever have become locked.

In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder, and listen to Garna's stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert learned about her father's house in Burnham, which he should some day see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug, when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had come to live with Garna.

So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until, in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna's high bed. Every now and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the back-parlour, it was with a "I'm going to sleep with you to-night!" Then he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the great feathery soft bed in Garna's room. He would sink off to sleep in billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting, dear presence of Garna filling