The Voice of the Open Country

"Aunt Agatha!" Diane rapped lightly at her aunt's bedroom door. "Are you asleep?"

"No, no indeed!" puffed Aunt Agatha forlornly. "Certainly not. When in the world did you come back from the farm, child? I've worried so! And like you, too, to come back as unexpectedly as you went." She opened the door wider for her niece to enter. "But as for sleep, Diane, I hope I'm not as callous as that. I shan't sleep a wink to-night, I'm sure of it."

Aunt Agatha dabbed ineffectually at her round, aggrieved eyes.

"Carl's a terrible responsibility for me, Diane," she went on, "though to be sure there have been wild nights when I've put cotton in my ears and locked the door and if I'd only remembered to do that I wouldn't have heard the glass crash--one of the Florentine set, too, I haven't the ghost of a doubt. I feel those things, Diane. Mamma, too, had a gift of feeling things she didn't know for sure--mamma did!--and the servants talk--of course they do!--who wouldn't? I must say, though, Carl's always kind to me; I will say that for him but--"

The excellent lady whose mental convolutions permitted her to speculate wildly in words with the least possible investment of ideas, rambled by serpentine paths of complaint to a conversational cul-de-sac and trailed off in a tragic sniff.

Diane resolutely smothered her impatience.

"I--I only ran down overnight. Aunt Agatha," she said, "to--to tell you something--"