“And will be for forty more years I hope,” said Pat with a hug. “But we haven’t quite finished, Judy. I want to see what’s in that old black chest in the corner. It hasn’t been turned out properly for years.”

“Oh, oh, there’s nothing much there but the relics av ould dacency,” said Judy.

“We really should examine it. The moths may have got into it.”

“Sure and it’s always aisy to find an excuse for what ye want to do,” said Judy slyly. “But we’ll ransack it if ye wait till I get supper. We’ll come up here in the dim and see what’s in it.”

Accordingly, after supper Pat betook herself to the garret, which was growing shadowy, although the outside world was still in the glow of sunset. It was a spring sunset…pale golds and soft pinks and ethereal apple greens shading up to silvery blue over the birches. Pat ached with the loveliness of it, being one of those

“who feel the thrill

Of beauty like a pang.”

Violet mists were veiling the distant hills. The little green-skirted maples over at Swallowfield were dancing girls with the dark spruces behind them, like grim, old-maid duennas. Sid had ploughed the Mince Pie field that day and it lay in beautiful, red, even furrows. From the Field of the Pool there sounded the dreamy trill of a few frogs through the brooding spring evening and there was some indefinable glamour over everything. Things were a little “queer” as they had sometimes seemed in childhood on certain evenings.

“This makes me think of the night you told me Cuddles was coming,” she said to Judy, who came up the stairs, panting a little. “Oh, Judy dear, just look at that sunset.”

“Innything spacial about it?” asked Judy a little shortly…because she didn’t like the idea of being out of breath after only two flights of stairs.

“There’s something special about every sunset, Judy. I never saw a cloud just that color and shape before…see…the one over the tall fir-tree.”

“I’m not denying it’s handsome. Sure and I wudn’t be like ould Rob Pennock at the South Glen. His wife was rale ashamed av his insinsibility. ‘He doesn’t know there’s such a thing as a sunset,’—she sez to me once, impatient-like.”

“How terrible it must be not to see and feel beauty,” said Pat softly. “I’m so glad I can find happiness in all lovely little things…like that cloud. It seems to me that every time I look out of a window the world gives me a gift. Look at those old dark firs around the pool. Judy, does it ever seem to you that the Pool is drying up? It seems to me that it isn’t as deep as it used to be.”