ready to go. She packed her little black box jubilantly and found it an
excellent chance to work in neatly a certain line from a poem Dean had
recently read to her which had captured her fancy.

“‘Good-bye, proud world, I’m going home,’” she declaimed feelingly,
standing at the top of the long, dark, shining staircase and
apostrophizing the row of grim Priest photographs hanging on the wall.

But she was much annoyed over one thing. Aunt Nancy would not give her
back the picture Teddy had painted.

“I’m going to keep it,” Aunt Nancy said, grinning and shaking her gold
tassels. “Some day that picture will be worth something as the early
effort of a famous artist.”

“I only lent it to you--I told you I only lent it to you,” said Emily
indignantly.

“I’m an unscrupulous old demon,” said Aunt Nancy coolly. “That is
what the Priests all call me behind my back. Don’t they, Caroline?
May as well have the game as the name. I happen to have a fancy for
that picture, that’s all. I’m going to frame it and hang it here in my
parlour. But I’ll leave it to you in my will--that and the chessy-cat
and the gazing-ball and my gold earrings. Nothing else--I’m not going
to leave you a cent of my money--never count on that.”

“I don’t want it,” said Emily loftily. “I’m going to earn heaps of
money for myself. But it isn’t fair of you to keep my picture. It was
given to me.”

“I never was fair,” said Aunt Nancy. “Was I, Caroline?”

“No,” said Caroline shrewishly.

“You see. Now don’t make a fuss, Emily. You’ve been a very good child
but I feel that I’ve done my duty by you for this year. Go back to New
Moon and when Elizabeth won’t let you do things tell her _I_ always let
you. I don’t know if it will do any good but try it. Elizabeth, like
every one else related to me, is always wondering what I’m going to do
with my money.”

Cousin Jimmy came over for Emily. How glad she was to see his kind face
with its gentle, elfish eyes and forked beard again! But she felt very
badly when she turned to Dean.

“If you like I’ll kiss you good-bye,” she said chokily.

Emily did not like kissing people. She did not really want to kiss
Dean but she liked him so much she thought she ought to extend all the
courtesies to him.

Dean looked down smiling into her face, so young, so pure, so softly
curved.

“No, I don’t want you to kiss me--yet. And our first kiss mustn’t have
the flavour of good-bye. It would be a bad omen. Star O’ Morning, I’m
sorry you’re going. But I’ll see you again before long. My oldest
sister lives in Blair Water, you know, and I feel a sudden access of
brotherly affection towards her. I seem to see myself visiting her very
often henceforth. In the meantime remember you have promised to write
me every week. And I’ll write you.”

“Nice fat letters,” coaxed Emily. “I love fat letters.”

“Fat! They’ll be positively corpulent, Star. Now, I’m not even going to
_say_ good-bye. Let’s make a pact, Star. We’ll never _say_ good-bye to
each other. We’ll just smile and go.”

Emily made a gallant effort--smiled--and went. Aunt Nancy and Caroline
returned to the back parlour and their cribbage. Dean Priest whistled
for Tweed and went to the bay shore. He was so lonely that he laughed
at himself.

Emily and Cousin Jimmy had so much to talk of that the drive home
seemed very short.

New Moon was white in the evening sunshine which also lay with
exceeding mellowness on the grey old barns. The Three Princesses,
shooting up against the silvery sky, were as remote and princessly as
ever. The old gulf was singing away down over the fields.

Aunt Laura came running out to meet them, her lovely blue eyes shining
with pleasure. Aunt Elizabeth was in the cook-house preparing supper
and only shook hands with Emily, but looked a trifle less grim and
stately than usual, and she had made Emily’s favourite cream-puffs for
supper. Perry was hanging about, barefooted and sunburned, to tell
her all the gossip of kittens and calves and little pigs and the new
foal. Ilse came swooping over, and Emily discovered she had forgotten
how vivid Ilse was--how brilliant her amber eyes, how golden her mane
of spun-silk hair, looking more golden than ever under the bright
blue silk tam Mrs. Simms had bought her in Shrewsbury. As an article
of dress, that loud tam made Laura Murray’s eyes and sensibilities
ache, but its colour certainly did set off Ilse’s wonderful hair. She
engulfed Emily in a rapturous embrace and quarrelled bitterly with her
ten minutes later over the fact that Emily refused to give her Saucy
Sal’s sole surviving kitten.

“I ought to have it, you doddering hyena,” stormed Ilse. “It’s as much
mine as yours, pig! Our old barn cat is its father.”

“Such talk is not decent,” said Aunt Elizabeth, pale with horror. “And
if you two children are going to quarrel over that kitten I’ll have it
drowned--remember that.”

Ilse was finally appeased by Emily’s offering to let her name the
kitten and have a half interest in it. Ilse named it Daffodil. Emily
did not think this suitable, since, from the fact of Cousin Jimmy
referring to it as Little Tommy, she suspected it was of the sterner
sex. But rather than again provoke Aunt Elizabeth’s wrath by discussing
tabooed subjects, she agreed.

“I can call it Daff,” she thought. “That sounds more _masculine_.”

The kitten was a delicate bit of striped greyness that reminded Emily
of her dear lost Mikes. And it smelled so nice--of warmth and clean
furriness, with whiffs of the clover hay where Saucy Sal had made her
mother-nest.

After supper she heard Teddy’s whistle in the old orchard--the same
enchanting call. Emily flew out to greet him--after all, there was
nobody just like Teddy in the world. They had an ecstatic scamper up to
the Tansy Patch to see a new puppy that Dr. Burnley had given Teddy.
Mrs. Kent did not seem very glad to see Emily--she was colder and more
remote than ever, and she sat and watched the two children playing with
the chubby little pup with a smouldering fire in her dark eyes that
made Emily vaguely uncomfortable whenever she happened to glance up and
encounter it. Never before had she sensed Mrs. Kent’s dislike for her
so keenly as that night.

“Why doesn’t your mother like me?” she asked Teddy bluntly, when they
carried little Leo to the barn for the night.

“Because _I_ do,” said Teddy briefly. “She doesn’t like _anything_ I
like. I’m afraid she’ll poison Leo very soon. I--I wish she wasn’t
so fond of me,” he burst out, in the beginning of a revolt against
this abnormal jealousy of love, which he felt rather than understood
to be a fetter that was becoming galling. “She says she won’t let me
take up Latin and Algebra this year--you know Miss Brownell said I
might--because I’m not to go to college. She says she can’t bear to
part from me--ever. I don’t care about the Latin and stuff--but I want
to learn to be an artist--I want to go away some day to the schools
where they teach that. She won’t let me--she hates my pictures now
because she thinks I like them better than her. I _don’t_--I love
Mother--she’s awful sweet and good to me every other way. But she
thinks I do--and she’s burned some of them. I know she has. They’re
missing from the barn wall and I can’t find them anywhere. If she does
anything to Leo--I’ll--I’ll _hate_ her.”

“Tell her that,” said Emily coolly, with some of the Murray shrewdness
coming uppermost in her. “She doesn’t know that _you_ know she poisoned
Smoke and Buttercup. Tell her you do know it and that if she does
anything to Leo you won’t love her any more. She’ll be so frightened
of your _not_ loving her that she won’t meddle with Leo--I _know_.
Tell her gently--don’t hurt her feelings--but _tell_ her. It will,”
concluded Emily, with a killing imitation of Aunt Elizabeth delivering
an ultimatum, “be better for all concerned.”

“I believe I will,” said Teddy, much impressed. “I _can’t_ have Leo
disappear like my cats did--he’s the only dog I’ve ever had and I’ve
always wanted a dog. Oh, Emily, I’m glad you’re back!”

It was very nice to be told this--especially by Teddy. Emily went home
to New Moon happily. In the old kitchen the candles were lighted and
their flames were dancing in the winds of the August night blowing
through door and window.

“I suppose you’ll not like candles very well, Emily, after being used
to lamps at Wyther Grange,” said Aunt Laura with a little sigh. It was
one of the bitter, small things in Laura Murray’s life that Elizabeth’s
tyranny extended to candles.

Emily looked around her thoughtfully. One candle sputtered and bobbed
at her as if greeting her. One, with a long wick, glowed and smouldered
like a sulky little demon. One had a tiny flame--a sly, meditative
candle. One swayed with a queer fiery grace in the draught from the
door. One burned with a steady upright flame like a faithful soul.

“I--don’t know--Aunt Laura,” she answered slowly. “You can
be--friends--with candles. I believe I like the candles best after all.”

Aunt Elizabeth, coming in from the cook-house, heard her. Something
like pleasure gleamed in her gulf-blue eyes.

“You have some sense in you,” she said.

“That’s the second compliment she has paid me,” thought Emily.

“I think Emily has grown taller since she went to Wyther Grange,” Aunt
Laura said, looking at her rather wistfully.

Aunt Elizabeth, snuffing the candles, glanced sharply over her glasses.

“I can’t see it,” she said. “Her dress is just the same length on her.”

“I’m sure she has,” persisted Laura.

Cousin Jimmy, to settle the dispute, measured Emily by the sitting-room
door. She just touched the former mark.

“You see,” said Aunt Elizabeth triumphantly, liking to be right even in
this small matter.

“She looks--different,” said Laura with a sigh.

Laura, after all, was right. Emily _had_ grown, taller and older, in
soul, if not in body. It was this change which Laura felt, as close
and tender affection swiftly feels. The Emily who returned from Wyther
Grange was not the Emily who had gone there. She was no longer wholly
the child. Aunt Nancy’s family histories over which she had pondered,
her enduring anguish over the story of Ilse’s mother, that terrible
hour when she had lain cheek by jowl with death on the cliffs of the
bay shore, her association with Dean Priest, all had combined to mature
her intelligence and her emotions. When she went to the garret next
morning and pulled out her precious little bundle of manuscripts to
read them lovingly over she was amazed and rather grieved to find that
they were not half so good as she had believed they were. Some of them
were positively silly, she thought; she was ashamed of them--so ashamed
that she smuggled them down to the cook-house stove and burned them,
much to Aunt Elizabeth’s annoyance when she came to prepare dinner and
found the fire-box all choked up with charred paper.

Emily no longer wondered that Miss Brownell had made fun of
them--though this did not mellow her bitterness of remembrance in
regard to that lady in any degree. The rest she put back on the sofa
shelf, including “The Child of the Sea,” which still impressed her as
fairly good, though not just the wonderful composition she had once
deemed it. She felt that many passages could be re-written to their
advantage. Then she immediately began writing a new poem, “On Returning
Home After Weeks’ Absence.” As everything and everybody connected with
New Moon had to be mentioned in this poem it promised to be quite long
and to furnish agreeable occupation for spare minutes in many weeks to
come. It was very good to be home again.

“There is no place just like dear New Moon,” thought Emily.

One thing that marked her return--one of those little household
“epochs” that make a keener impression on the memory and imagination
than perhaps their real importance warrants--was the fact that she was
given a room of her own. Aunt Elizabeth had found her unshared slumber
too sweet a thing to be again surrendered. She decided that she could
not put up any longer with a squirming bedfellow who asked unearthly
questions at any hour of the night she took it into her head to do so.

So, after a long conference with Laura, it was settled that Emily was
to have her mother’s room--the “lookout” as it was called, though
it was not really a lookout. But it occupied the place in New Moon,
looking over the front door to the garden, that the real lookouts did
in other Blair Water houses, so it went by that name. It had been
prepared for Emily’s occupancy in her absence and when bedtime came on
the first evening of her return Aunt Elizabeth curtly told her that
henceforth she was to have her mother’s room.

“All to myself?” exclaimed Emily.

“Yes. We will expect you to take care of it yourself and keep it very
tidy.”

“It has never been slept in since the night before your mother--went
away,” said Aunt Laura, with a queer sound in her voice--a sound of
which Aunt Elizabeth disapproved.

“Your mother,” she said, looking coldly at Emily over the flame of the
candle--an attitude that gave a rather gruesome effect to her acquiline
features--“_ran_ away--flouted her family and broke her father’s heart.
She was a silly, ungrateful, disobedient girl. I hope _you_ will never
disgrace your family by such conduct.”

“Oh, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily breathlessly, “when you hold the
candle down like that it makes your face look just like a corpse! Oh,
it’s so interesting.”

Aunt Elizabeth turned and led the way upstairs in grim silence. There
was no use in wasting perfectly good admonitions on a child like this.

Left alone in her lookout, lighted dimly by the one small candle, Emily
gazed about her with keen and thrilling interest. She could not get
into bed until she had explored every bit of it. The room was very
old-fashioned, like all the New Moon rooms. The walls were papered with
a design of slender gilt diamonds enclosing golden stars and hung with
worked woollen mottoes and pictures that had been “supplements” in the
girlhood of her aunts. One of them, hanging over the head of the bed,
represented two guardian angels. In its day this had been much admired
but Emily looked at it with distaste.

“I don’t like feather wings on angels,” she said decidedly. “Angels
should have rainbowy wings.”

On the floor was a pretty homespun carpet and round braided rugs. There
was a high black bedstead with carved posts, a fat feather-bed, and an
Irish chain quilt, but, as Emily was glad to see, no curtains. A little
table, with funny claw-feet and brass-knobbed drawers, stood by the
window, which was curtained with muslin frills; one of the window-panes
contorted the landscape funnily, making a hill where no hill was. Emily
liked this--she couldn’t have told why, but it was really because
it gave the pane an individuality of its own. An oval mirror in a
tarnished gilt frame hung above the table; Emily was delighted to
find she could see herself in it--“all but my boots”--without craning
or tipping it. “And it doesn’t twist my face or turn my complexion
green,” she thought happily. Two high-backed, black chairs with
horsehair seats, a little washstand with a blue basin and pitcher, and
a faded ottoman with woollen roses cross-stitched on it, completed the
furnishing. On the little mantel were vases full of dried and coloured
grasses and a fascinating pot-bellied bottle filled with West Indian
shells. On either side were lovable little cupboards with leaded-glass
doors like those in the sitting-room. Underneath was a small fireplace.

“I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here,”
thought Emily.

The room was full of that indefinable charm found in all rooms where
the pieces of furniture, whether old or new, are well acquainted with
each other and the walls and floors are on good terms. Emily felt it
all over her as she flitted about examining everything. This was her
room--she loved it already--she felt perfectly at home.

“I belong here,” she breathed happily.

She felt deliciously _near_ to her mother--as if Juliet Starr had
suddenly become real to her. It thrilled her to think that her mother
had probably crocheted the lace cover on the round pincushion on the
table. And that fat, black jar of pot-pourri on the mantel--her mother
must have compounded it. When Emily lifted the lid a faint spicy odour
floated out. The souls of all the roses that had bloomed through many
olden summers at New Moon seemed to be prisoned there in a sort of
flower purgatory. Something in the haunting, mystical, elusive odour
gave Emily _the flash_--and her room had received its consecration.

There was a picture of her mother hanging over the mantel--a large
daguerreotype taken when she was a little girl. Emily looked at it
lovingly. She had the picture of her mother which her father had left,
taken after their marriage. But when Aunt Elizabeth had brought that
from Maywood to New Moon she had hung it in the parlour where Emily
seldom saw it. This picture, in her bedroom, of the golden-haired,
rose-cheeked girl, was all her own. She could look at it--talk to it at
will.

“Oh, Mother,” she said, “what did you think of when you were a little
girl here like me? I wish I could have known you _then_. And to think
nobody has ever slept here since that last night you did before you
ran away with Father. Aunt Elizabeth says you were wicked to do it but
_I_ don’t think you were. It wasn’t as if you were running away with
a _stranger_. Anyway, I’m glad you _did_, because if you hadn’t there
wouldn’t have been any _me_.”

Emily, very glad that there was an Emily, opened her lookout window as
high as it would go, got into bed and drifted off to sleep, feeling a
happiness that was so deep as to be almost pain as she listened to the
sonorous sweep of the night wind among the great trees in Lofty John’s
bush. When she wrote to her father a few days later she began the
letter “Dear Father and Mother.”

“And I’ll always write the letter to _you_ as well as Father after
this, Mother. I’m sorry I left you out so long. But you didn’t seem
_real_ till that night I came home. I made the bed beautifully next
morning--Aunt Elizabeth didn’t find a bit of fault with it--and I
dusted _everything_--and when I went out I knelt down and kissed the
doorstep. I didn’t think Aunt Elizabeth saw me but she did and said had
I gone crazy. Why does Aunt Elizabeth think any one is crazy who does
something she never does? I said ‘No, it’s only because I love my room
so much’ and she sniffed and said ‘You’d better love your God.’ But so
I do, dear Father--and Mother--and I love Him better than ever since
I have my dear room. I can see all over the garden from it and into
Lofty John’s bush and one little bit of the Blair Water through the gap
in the trees where the Yesterday Road runs. I like to go to bed early
now. I love to lie all alone in my own room and make poetry and think
out descriptions of things while I look through the open window at the
stars and the nice, big, kind, quiet trees in Lofty John’s bush.

“Oh, Father dear and Mother, we are going to have a new teacher. Miss
Brownell is not coming back. She is going to be married and Ilse says
that when her father heard it he said ‘God help the man.’ And the new
teacher is a Mr. Carpenter. Ilse saw him when he came to see her father
about the school--because Dr. Burnley is a trustee this year--and she
says he has bushy grey hair and whiskers. He is married, too, and is
going to live in that little old house down in the hollow below the
school. It seems so funny to think of a teacher having a wife and
whiskers.

“I am glad to be home. But I miss Dean and the gazing-ball. Aunt
Elizabeth looked very cross when she saw my bang but didn’t say
anything. Aunt Laura says just to keep quiet and go on wearing it.
But I don’t feel comfortable going against Aunt Elizabeth so I have
combed it all back except a _little_ fringe. I don’t feel _quite_
comfortable about it even yet, but I have to put up with being a little
uncomfortable for the sake of my looks. Aunt Laura says bustles are
going out of style so I’ll never be able to have one but I don’t care
because I think they’re ugly. Rhoda Stuart will be cross because she
was just longing to be old enough to wear a bustle. I hope I’ll be able
to have a gin-jar all to myself when the weather gets cold. There is a
row of gin-jars on the high shelf in the cook-house.

“Teddy and I had the nicest _adventure_ yesterday evening. We are going
to keep it a secret from everybody--partly because it was so nice, and
partly because we think we’d get a fearful scolding for one thing we
did.

“We went up to the Disappointed House, and we found one of the boards
on the windows loose. So we pried it off and crawled in and went all
over the house. It is lathed but not plastered, and the shavings are
lying all over the floors just as the carpenters left them years
ago. It seemed more disappointed than ever. I just felt like crying.
There was a dear little fireplace in one room so we went to work and
kindled a fire in it with shavings and pieces of boards (this is the
thing we would be scolded for, likely) and then sat before it on an
old carpenter’s bench and talked. We decided that when we grew up we
would buy the Disappointed House and live here together. Teddy said he
supposed we’d have to get married, but I thought maybe we could find
a way to manage without going to all that bother. Teddy will paint
pictures and I will write poetry and we will have toast and bacon and
marmalade _every morning_ for breakfast--just like Wyther Grange--but
_never_ porridge. And we’ll always have lots of nice things to eat in
the pantry and I’ll make lots of jam and Teddy is always going to help
me wash the dishes and we’ll hang the gazing-ball from the middle of
the ceiling in the fireplace room--because likely Aunt Nancy will be
dead by then.

“When the fire burned out we jammed the board into place in the window
and came away. Every now and then to-day Teddy would say to me “Toast
and bacon and marmalade” in the _most mysterious_ tones and Ilse and
Perry are wild because they can’t find out what he means.

“Cousin Jimmy has got Jimmy Joe Belle to help with the harvest. Jimmy
Joe Belle comes from over Derry Pond way. There are a great many French
there and when a French girl marries they call her mostly by her
husband’s first name instead of Mrs. like the English do. If a girl
named Mary marries a man named Leon she will always be called Mary Leon
after that. But in Jimmy Joe Belle’s case, it is the other way and he
is called by his wife’s name. I asked Cousin Jimmy why, and he said it
was because Jimmy Joe was a poor stick of a creature and Belle wore
the britches. But still I don’t understand. Jimmy Joe wears britches
himself--that means trousers--and why should he be called Jimmy Joe
Belle instead of her being called Belle Jimmy Joe just because she
wears them too! I won’t rest till I find out.

“Cousin Jimmy’s garden is splendid now. The tiger lilies are out. I am
trying to love them because nobody seems to like them at all but deep
down in my heart I know I love the late roses best. You just can’t help
loving the roses best.

“Ilse and I hunted all over the old orchard to-day for a four-leaved
clover and couldn’t find one. Then I found one in a clump of clover
by the dairy steps to-night when I was straining the milk and never
thinking of clovers. Cousin Jimmy says that is the way luck always
comes, and it is no use to look for it.

“It is lovely to be with Ilse again. We have only fought twice since I
came home. I am going to try not to fight with Ilse any more because
I don’t think it is dignified, although quite interesting. But it is
hard not to because even when I keep quiet and don’t say a word Ilse
thinks that’s a way of fighting and gets madder and says worse things
than ever. Aunt Elizabeth says it always takes two to make a quarrel
but she doesn’t know Ilse as I do. Ilse called me a sneaking albatross
to-day. I wonder how many animals are left to call me. She never
repeats the same one twice. I wish she wouldn’t clapper-claw Perry so
much. (Clapper-claw is a word I learned from Aunt Nancy. Very striking,
I think.) It seems as if she couldn’t bear him. He dared Teddy to jump
from the henhouse roof across to the pighouse roof. Teddy wouldn’t. He
said he would try it if it had to be done or would do anybody any good
but he wasn’t going to do it just to show off. Perry did it and landed
safe. If he hadn’t he might have broken his neck. Then he bragged about
it and said Teddy was afraid and Ilse turned red as a beet and told
him to shut up or she would bite his snout off. She can’t bear to have
anything said against Teddy, but I guess he can take care of himself.

“Ilse can’t study for the Entrance either. Her father won’t let her.
But she says she doesn’t care. She says she’s going to run away when
she gets a little older and study for the stage. That sounds wicked,
but interesting.

“I felt very queer and guilty when I saw Ilse first, because I knew
about her mother. I don’t know why I felt guilty because I had nothing
to do with it. The feeling is wearing away a little now but I am so
unhappy by spells over it. I wish I could either forget it altogether
or find out the rights of it. Because I am sure nobody knows them.

“I had a letter from Dean to-day. He writes lovely letters--just as
if I was grown up. He sent me a little poem he had cut out of a paper
called _The Fringed Gentian_. He said it made him think of me. It is
all lovely but I like the last verse best of all. This is it:

    Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
    How I may upward climb
    The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep,
    That leads to heights sublime.
    How I may reach that far-off goal
    Of true and honored fame
    And write upon its shining scroll
    A woman’s humble name.

“When I read that _the flash_ came, and I took a sheet of paper--I
forgot to tell you Cousin Jimmy gave me a little box of paper and
envelopes--_on the sly_--and I wrote on it:

    I, Emily Byrd Starr, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb
    the Alpine Path and write my name on the scroll of fame.

“Then I put it in the envelope and sealed it up and wrote on it _The
Vow of Emily Byrd Starr, aged 12 years and 3 months_, and put it away
on the sofa shelf in the garret.

“I am writing a murder story now and I am trying to feel how a man
would feel who was a murderer. It is creepy, but thrilling. I almost
feel as if I _had_ murdered somebody.

        “Good night, dear Father and Mother.
                       “Your lovingest daughter,
                                           “_Emily_.

“P. S. I have been wondering how I’ll sign my name when I grow up and
print my pieces. I don’t know which would be best--Emily Byrd Starr in
full or Emily B. Starr, or E. B. Starr, or E. Byrd Starr. Sometimes
I think I’ll have a _nom-de-plume_--that is, another name you pick
for yourself. It’s in my dictionary among the “French phrases” at the
back. If I did that then I could hear people talking of my pieces right
before me, never suspecting, and say just what they really thought of
them. That would be interesting but perhaps not always comfortable. I
think I’ll be,

                                  “_E. Byrd Starr_.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

A WEAVER OF DREAMS

It took Emily several weeks to make up her mind whether she liked Mr.
Carpenter or not. She knew she did not _dis_like him, not even though
his first greeting, shot at her on the opening day of school in a gruff
voice, accompanied by a startling lift of his spiky grey brows was, “So
you’re the girl that writes poetry, eh? Better stick to your needle and
duster. Too many fools in the world trying to write poetry and failing.
I tried it myself once. Got better sense now.”

“You don’t keep your nails clean,” thought Emily.

But he upset every kind of school tradition so speedily and thoroughly
that Ilse, who gloried in upsetting things and hated routine, was the
only scholar that liked him from the start. Some never liked him--the
Rhoda Stuart type for example--but most of them came to it after they
got used to never being used to anything. And Emily finally decided
that she liked him tremendously.

Mr. Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty--a tall man, with
an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey moustache and
eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of which all his
wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean, greyish
face, deeply lined. He lived in a little two-roomed house below the
school with a shy mouse of a wife. He never talked of his past or
offered any explanation of the fact that at his age he had no better
profession than teaching a district school for a pittance of salary,
but the truth leaked out after a while; for Prince Edward Island is a
small province and everybody in it knows something about everybody
else. So eventually Blair Water people, and even the school children,
understood that Mr. Carpenter had been a brilliant student in his youth
and had had his eye on the ministry. But at college he had got in with
a “fast set”--Blair Water people nodded heads slowly and whispered
the dreadful phrase portentously--and the fast set had ruined him. He
“took to drink” and went to the dogs generally. And the upshot of it
all was that Francis Carpenter, who had led his class in his first and
second years at McGill, and for whom his teachers had predicted a great
career, was a country school-teacher at forty-five with no prospect of
ever being anything else. Perhaps he was resigned to it--perhaps not.
Nobody ever knew, not even the brown mouse of a wife. Nobody in Blair
Water cared--he was a good teacher, and that was all that mattered.
Even if he did go on occasional “sprees” he always took Saturday for
them and was sober enough by Monday. Sober, and especially dignified,
wearing a rusty black frock coat which he never put on any other day
of the week. He did not invite pity and he did not pose as a tragedy.
But sometimes, when Emily looked at his face, bent over the arithmetic
problems of Blair Water School, she felt horribly sorry for him without
in the least understanding why.

He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at least
once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few minutes,
tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him patience,
abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his wrath in
particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few minutes Mr.
Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun bursting through a
storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating. Nobody seemed to
cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He never said any of the
biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say, which rankled and festered
for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on just and unjust and rolled
off harmlessly.

He could take a joke on himself in perfect good nature. “Do you hear
me? Do you hear me, sirrah?” he bellowed to Perry Miller one day. “Of
course I hear you,” retorted Perry coolly, “they could hear you in
Charlottetown.” Mr. Carpenter stared for a moment, then broke into a
great, jolly laugh.

His methods of teaching were so different from Miss Brownell’s that
the Blair Water pupils at first felt as if he had stood them on their
heads. Miss Brownell had been a martinet for order. Mr. Carpenter
never tried to keep order apparently. But somehow he kept the children
so busy that they had no time to do mischief. He taught history
tempestuously for a month, making his pupils play the different
characters and enact the incidents. He never bothered any one to
learn dates--but the dates stuck in the memory just the same. If, as
Mary Queen of Scots, you were beheaded by the school axe, kneeling
blindfolded at the doorstep, with Perry Miller, wearing a mask made out
of a piece of Aunt Laura’s old black silk, for executioner, wondering
what would happen if he brought the axe down _too_ hard, you did not
forget the year it happened; and if you fought the battle of Waterloo
all over the school playground, and heard Teddy Kent shouting, “Up,
Guards and at ’em!” as he led the last furious charge you remembered
1815 without half trying to.

Next month history would be thrust aside altogether and geography
would take its place, when school and playground were mapped out into
countries and you dressed up as the animals inhabiting them or traded
in various commodities over their rivers and cities. When Rhoda Stuart
had cheated you in a bargain in hides, you remembered that she had
bought the cargo from the Argentine Republic, and when Perry Miller
would not drink any water for a whole hot summer day because he was
crossing the Arabian Desert with a caravan of camels and could not
find an oasis, and then drank so much that he took terrible cramps and
Aunt Laura had to be up all night with him--you did not forget where
the said desert was. The trustees were quite scandalized over some of
the goings on and felt sure that the children were having too good a
time to be really learning anything.

If you wanted to learn Latin and French you had to do it by talking
your exercises, not writing them, and on Friday afternoons all lessons
were put aside and Mr. Carpenter made the children recite poems, make
speeches and declaim passages from Shakespeare and the Bible. This was
the day Ilse loved. Mr. Carpenter pounced on her gift like a starving
dog on a bone and drilled her without mercy. They had endless fights
and Ilse stamped her foot and called him names while the other pupils
wondered why she was not punished for it but at last had to give in
and do as he willed. Ilse went to school regularly--something she had
never done before. Mr. Carpenter had told her that if she were absent
for a day without good excuse she could take no part in the Friday
“exercises” and this would have killed her.

One day Mr. Carpenter had picked up Teddy’s slate and found a sketch
of himself on it, in one of his favourite if not exactly beautiful
attitudes. Teddy had labelled it “The Black Death”--half of the pupils
of the school having died that day of the Great Plague, and having
been carried out on stretchers to the Potter’s Field by the terrified
survivors.

Teddy expected a roar of denunciation, for the day before Garrett
Marshall had been ground into figurative pulp on being discovered with
the picture of a harmless cow on his slate--at least, Garrett said he
meant it for a cow. But now this amazing Mr. Carpenter only drew his
beetling brows together, looked earnestly at Teddy’s slate, put it down
on the desk, looked at Teddy, and said,

“I don’t know anything about drawing--I can’t help you, but, by gad, I
think hereafter you’d better give up those extra arithmetic problems in
the afternoon and draw pictures.”

Whereupon Garrett Marshall went home and told his father that “old
Carpenter” wasn’t fair and “made favourites” over Teddy Kent.

Mr. Carpenter went up to the Tansy Patch that evening and saw the
sketches in Teddy’s old barn-loft studio. Then he went into the house
and talked to Mrs. Kent. What he said and what she said nobody ever
knew. But Mr. Carpenter went away looking grim, as if he had met an
unexpected match. He took great pains with Teddy’s general school work
after that and procured from somewhere certain elementary text books on
drawing which he gave him, telling him not to take them home--a caution
Teddy did not require. He knew quite well that if he did they would
disappear as mysteriously as his cats had done. He had taken Emily’s
advice and told his mother he would not love _her_ if anything happened
to Leo, and Leo flourished and waxed fat and doggy. But Teddy was too
gentle at heart and too fond of his mother to make such a threat more
than once. He knew she had cried all that night after Mr. Carpenter had
been there, and prayed on her knees in her little bedroom most of the
next day, and looked at him with bitter, haunting eyes for a week. He
wished she were more like other fellows’ mothers but they loved each
other very much and had dear hours together in the little grey house on
the tansy hill. It was only when other people were about that Mrs. Kent
was queer and jealous.

“She’s always lovely when we’re alone,” Teddy had told Emily.

As for the other boys, Perry Miller was the only one Mr. Carpenter
bothered much with in the way of speeches--and he was as merciless
with him as with Ilse. Perry worked hard to please him and practiced
his speeches in barn and field--and even by nights in the kitchen
loft--until Aunt Elizabeth put a stop to _that_. Emily could not
understand why Mr. Carpenter would smile amiably and say, “Very good”
when Neddy Gray rattled off a speech glibly, without any expression
whatever, and then rage at Perry and denounce him as a dunce and a
nincompoop, by gad, because he had failed to give just the proper
emphasis on a certain word, or had timed his gesture a fraction of a
second too soon.

Neither could she understand why he made red pencil corrections
all over her compositions and rated her for split infinitives and
too lavish adjectives and strode up and down the aisle and hurled
objurgations at her because she didn’t know “a good place to stop when
she saw it, by gad,” and then told Rhoda Stuart and Nan Lee that their
compositions were very pretty and gave them back without so much as
a mark on them. Yet, in spite of it all, she liked him more and more
as time went on and autumn passed and winter came with its beautiful
bare-limbed trees, and soft pearl-grey skies that were slashed with
rifts of gold in the afternoons, and cleared to a jewelled pageantry of
stars over the wide white hills and valleys around New Moon.

Emily shot up so that winter that Aunt Laura had to let down the tucks
in her dresses. Aunt Ruth, who had come for a week’s visit, said she
was outgrowing her strength--consumptive children always did.

“I am _not_ consumptive,” Emily said. “The Starrs are tall,” she added,
with a touch of subtle malice hardly to be looked for in near-thirteen.

Aunt Ruth, who was sensitive in regard to her dumpiness, sniffed.

“It would be well if _that_ were the only thing in which you resemble
them,” she said. “How are you getting on in school?”

“Very well. I am the smartest scholar in my class,” answered Emily
composedly.

“You conceited child!” said Aunt Ruth.

“I’m _not_ conceited.” Emily looked scornful indignation. “Mr.
Carpenter said it and _he_ doesn’t flatter. Besides, I can’t help
seeing it myself.”

“Well, it is to be hoped you have some brains, because you haven’t
much in the way of looks,” said Aunt Ruth. “You’ve no complexion to
speak of--and that inky hair around your white face is startling. I see
you’re going to be a plain girl.”

“You wouldn’t say that to a grown-up person’s face,” said Emily with a
deliberate gravity which always exasperated Aunt Ruth because she could
not understand it in a child. “I don’t think it would hurt you to be as
polite to me as you are to other people.”

“I’m telling you your faults so you may correct them,” said Aunt Ruth
frigidly.

“It _isn’t_ my fault that my face is pale and my hair black,” protested
Emily. “I can’t correct that.”

“If you were a different girl,” said Aunt Ruth, “I would--”

“But I don’t _want_ to be a different girl,” said Emily decidedly. She
had no intention of lowering the Starr flag to Aunt Ruth. “I wouldn’t
want to be anybody but myself even if I am plain. Besides,” she added
impressively as she turned to go out of the room, “though I may not
be very good-looking now, when I go to heaven I believe I’ll be very
beautiful.”

“Some people think Emily quite pretty,” said Aunt Laura, but she did
not say it until Emily was out of hearing. She was Murray enough for
that.

“I don’t know where they see it,” said Aunt Ruth. “She’s vain and
pert and says things to be thought smart. You heard her just now. But
the thing I dislike most in her is that she is un-childlike--and deep
as the sea. Yes, she is, Laura--deep as the sea. You’ll find it out
to your cost one day if you disregard my warning. She’s capable of
anything. Sly is no word for it. You and Elizabeth don’t keep a tight
enough rein over her.”

“I’ve done my best,” said Elizabeth stiffly. She herself did think
she had been much too lenient with Emily--Laura and Jimmy were two to
one--but it nettled her to have Ruth say so.

Uncle Wallace also had an attack of worrying over Emily that winter.

He looked at her one day when he was at New Moon and remarked that she
was getting to be a big girl.

“How old are you, Emily?” He asked her that every time he came to New
Moon.

“Thirteen in May.”

“H’m. What are you going to do with her, Elizabeth?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Aunt Elizabeth coldly--or as
coldly as is possible to speak when one is pouring melted tallow into
candle-moulds.

“Why, she’ll soon be grown up. She can’t expect you to provide for her
indefinitely”--

“I don’t,” Emily whispered resentfully under her breath.

“--and it’s time we decided what is best to be done for her.”

“The Murray women have never had to work out for a living,” said Aunt
Elizabeth, as if that disposed of the matter.

“Emily is only half Murray,” said Wallace. “Besides, times are
changing. You and Laura will not live forever, Elizabeth, and when you
are gone New Moon goes to Oliver’s Andrew. In my opinion Emily should
be fitted to support herself if necessary.”

Emily did not like Uncle Wallace but she was very grateful to him at
that moment. Whatever his motives were he was proposing the very thing
she secretly yearned for.

“I would suggest,” said Uncle Wallace, “that she be sent to Queen’s
Academy to get a teacher’s license. Teaching is a genteel, lady-like
occupation. _I_ will do my share in providing for the expense of it.”

A blind person might have seen that Uncle Wallace thought this very
splendid of himself.

“If you do,” thought Emily, “I’ll pay every cent back to you as soon as
I’m able to earn it.”

But Aunt Elizabeth was adamant.

“I do not believe in girls going out into the world,” she said. “I
don’t mean Emily to go to Queen’s. I told Mr. Carpenter so when he
came to see me about her taking up the Entrance work. He was very
rude--school-teachers knew their place better in my father’s time. But
I made him understand, I think. I’m rather surprised at _you_, Wallace.
You did not send your own daughter out to work.”

“_My_ daughter had parents to provide for her,” retorted Uncle Wallace
pompously. “Emily is an orphan. I imagined from what I had heard about
her that she would prefer earning her own living to living on charity.”

“So I would,” cried out Emily. “So I would, Uncle Wallace. Oh, Aunt
Elizabeth, please let me study for the Entrance. Please! I’ll pay you
back every cent you spend on it--I will indeed. I pledge you my word of
honour.”

“It does not happen to be a question of money,” said Aunt Elizabeth
in her stateliest manner. “I undertook to provide for you, Emily, and
I will do it. When you are older I may send you to the High School in
Shrewbury for a couple of years. I am not decrying education. But you
are not going to be a slave to the public--no Murray girl ever was
_that_.”

Emily realising the uselessness of pleading, went out in the same
bitter disappointment she had felt after Mr. Carpenter’s visit. Then
Aunt Elizabeth looked at Wallace.

“Have you forgotten what came of sending Juliet to Queen’s?” she asked
significantly.

If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry
had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged
determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status at New
Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had ceased to
refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she recognised that
though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was not going to remain
one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s patching up his ragged bits
of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him with his lessons in the kitchen
after supper, nor did she growl when Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a
certain small wage--though older boys than Perry were still glad to put
in the winter months choring for board and lodging in some comfortable
home. If a future premier was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth
wanted to have some small share in the making. It was credible and
commendable that a boy should have ambitions. A girl was an entirely
different matter. A girl’s place was at home.

Emily helped Perry work out algebra problems and heard his lessons in
French and Latin. She picked up more thus than Aunt Elizabeth would
have approved and more still when the Entrance pupils talked those
languages in school. It was quite an easy matter for a girl who had
once upon a time invented a language of her own. When George Bates,
by way of showing off, asked her one day in French--_his_ French, of
which Mr. Carpenter had once said doubtfully that perhaps God might
understand it--“Have you the ink of my grandmother and the shoebrush of
my cousin and the umbrella of my aunt’s husband in your desk?” Emily
retorted quite as glibly and _quite_ as Frenchily, “No, but I have the
pen of your father and the cheese of the innkeeper and the towel of
your uncle’s maidservant in my basket.”

To console herself for her disappointment in regard to the Entrance
class Emily wrote more poetry than ever. It was especially delightful
to write poetry on a winter evening when the storm winds howled without
and heaped the garden and orchard with big ghostly drifts, starred
over with rabbits’ candles. She also wrote several stories--desperate
love affairs wherein she struggled heroically against the difficulties
of affectionate dialogue; tales of bandits and pirates--Emily liked
these because there was no necessity for bandits and pirates to
converse lovingly; tragedies of earls and countesses whose conversation
she dearly loved to pepper with scraps of French; and a dozen other
subjects she didn’t know anything about. She also meditated beginning a
novel but decided it would be too hard to get enough paper for it. The
letter-bills were all done now and the Jimmy-books were not big enough,
though a new one always appeared mysteriously in her school basket when
the old one was almost full. Cousin Jimmy seemed to have an uncanny
prescience of the proper time--that was part of his Jimmyness.

Then one night, as she lay in her lookout bed and watched a full moon
gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley, she had a
sudden dazzling idea.

She would send her latest poem to the Charlottetown _Enterprise_.

The _Enterprise_ had a Poet’s Corner where “original” verses were
frequently printed. Privately Emily thought her own were quite as
good--as probably they were, for most of the _Enterprise_ “poems” were
sad trash.

Emily was so excited over the idea that she could not sleep for the
greater part of the night--and didn’t want to. It was glorious to lie
there, thrilling in the darkness, and picture the whole thing out. She
saw her verses in print signed E. Byrd Starr--she saw Aunt Laura’s
eyes shining with pride--she saw Mr. Carpenter pointing them out to
strangers--“the work of a pupil of mine, by gad”--she saw all her
schoolmates envying her or admiring, according to type--she saw herself
with one foot at least firmly planted on the ladder of fame--one hill
at least of the Alpine Path crested, with a new and glorious prospect
opening therefrom.

Morning came. Emily went to school, so absent-minded because of her
secret that she did badly in everything and was raged at by Mr.
Carpenter. But it all slipped off her like the proverbial water off a
duck’s back. Her body was in Blair Water school but her spirit was in
kingdoms empyreal.

As soon as school was out she betook herself to the garret with half a
sheet of blue-lined notepaper. Very painstakingly she copied down the
poem, being especially careful to dot every _i_ and cross every _t_.
She wrote it on both sides of the paper, being in blissful ignorance
of any taboo thereon. Then she read it aloud delightedly, not omitting
the title _Evening Dreams_. There was one line in it she tasted two or
three times:

    The haunting elfin music of the air.

“I think that line is _very_ good,” said Emily. “I wonder now how I
happened to think of it.”

She mailed her poem the next day and lived in a delicious mystic
rapture until the following Saturday. When the _Enterprise_ came she
opened it with tremulous eagerness and ice-cold fingers, and turned to
the Poet’s Corner. Now for her great moment!

There was not a sign of an Evening Dream about it!

Emily threw down the _Enterprise_ and fled to the garret dormer where,
face downward on the old haircloth sofa, she wept out her bitterness
of disappointment. She drained the draught of failure to the very
dregs. It was horribly real and tragic to her. She felt exactly as if
she had been slapped in the face. She was crushed in the very dust of
humiliation and was sure she could never rise again.

How thankful she was that she hadn’t told Teddy anything about it--she
had been so strongly tempted to, and only refrained because she didn’t
want to spoil the dramatic surprise of the moment when she would show
him the verses with her name signed to them. She _had_ told Perry,
and Perry was furious when he saw her tear-stained face later on in
the dairy, as they strained the milk together. Ordinarily Emily loved
this, but to-night the savour had gone out of the world. Even the
milky splendour of the still, mild winter evening and the purple bloom
over the hillside woods that presaged a thaw could not give her the
accustomed soul-thrill.

“I’m going to Charlottetown if I have to walk and I’ll bust that
_Enterprise_ editor’s head,” said Perry, with the expression which,
thirty years later, warned the members of his party to scatter for
cover.

“That wouldn’t be any use,” said Emily drearily. “He didn’t think it
good enough to print--that is what hurts me so, Perry--he didn’t think
it any good. Busting his head wouldn’t change _that_.”

It took her a week to recover from the blow. Then she wrote a story
in which the editor of the _Enterprise_ played the part of a dark and
desperate villain who found lodging eventually behind prison bars.
This got the venom out of her system and she forgot all about him in
the delight of writing a poem addressed to “Sweet Lady April.” But
I question if she ever really forgave him--even when she discovered
eventually that you must _not_ write on both sides of the paper--even
when she read over _Evening Dreams_ a year later and wondered how she
could ever have thought it any good.

This sort of thing was happening frequently now. Every time she read
her little hoard of manuscripts over she found some of which the fairy
gold had unaccountably turned to withered leaves, fit only for the
burning. Emily burned them,--but it hurt her a little. Outgrowing
things we love is never a pleasant process.

CHAPTER XXIX

SACRILEGE

There had been several clashes between Aunt Elizabeth and Emily that
winter and spring. Generally Aunt Elizabeth came out victorious; there
was that in her that would not be denied the satisfaction of having
her own way even in trifling matters. But once in a while she came up
against that curious streak of granite in Emily’s composition which was
unyielding and unbendable and unbreakable. Mary Murray, of a hundred
years agone, had been, so family chronicle ran, a gentle and submissive
creature generally; but she had that same streak in her, as her “Here I
Stay” abundantly testified. When Aunt Elizabeth tried conclusions with
that element in Emily she always got the worst of it. Yet she did not
learn wisdom therefrom but pursued her policy of repression all the
more rigorously; for it occasionally came home to her, as Laura let
down tucks, that Emily was on the verge of beginning to grow up and
that various breakers and reefs loomed ahead, ominously magnified in
the mist of unseen years. Emily must not be allowed to get out of hand
now, lest later on she make shipwreck as her mother had done--or as
Elizabeth Murray firmly believed she had done. There were, in short, to
be no more elopements from New Moon.

One of the things they fell out about was the fact that Emily, as Aunt
Elizabeth discovered one day, was in the habit of using more of her
egg money to buy paper than Aunt Elizabeth approved of. What did Emily
do with so much paper? They had a fuss over this and eventually Aunt
Elizabeth discovered that Emily was writing stories. Emily had been
writing stories all winter under Aunt Elizabeth’s very nose and Aunt
Elizabeth had never suspected it. She had fondly supposed that Emily
was writing school compositions. Aunt Elizabeth knew in a vague way
that Emily wrote silly rhymes which she called “poetry” but this did
not worry her especially. Jimmy made up a lot of similar trash. It was
foolish but harmless and Emily would doubtless outgrow it. Jimmy had
not outgrown it, to be sure, but then his accident--Elizabeth always
went a little sick in soul when she remembered it--had made him more or
less a child for life.

But writing stories was a very different thing and Aunt Elizabeth was
horrified. Fiction of any kind was an abominable thing. Elizabeth
Murray had been trained up in this belief in her youth and in her
age she had not departed from it. She honestly thought that it was a
wicked and sinful thing in anyone to play cards, dance, or go to the
theatre, read or write novels, and in Emily’s case there was a worse
feature--it was the Starr coming out in her--Douglas Starr especially.
No Murray of New Moon had ever been guilty of writing “stories” or of
ever wanting to write them. It was an alien growth that must be pruned
off ruthlessly. Aunt Elizabeth applied the pruning shears; and found
no pliant, snippable root but that same underlying streak of granite.
Emily was respectful and reasonable and above-board; she bought no
more paper with egg money; but she told Aunt Elizabeth that she could
not give up writing stories and she went right on writing them, on
pieces of brown wrapping paper and the blank backs of circulars which
agricultural machinery firms sent Cousin Jimmy.

“Don’t you know that it is wicked to write novels?” demanded Aunt
Elizabeth.

“Oh, I’m not writing novels--yet,” said Emily. “I can’t get enough
paper. These are just short stories. And it isn’t wicked--Father liked
novels.”

“Your father--” began Aunt Elizabeth, and stopped. She remembered that
Emily had “acted up” before now when anything derogatory was said of
her father. But the very fact that she felt mysteriously compelled to
stop annoyed Elizabeth, who had said what seemed good to her all her
life at New Moon without much regard for other people’s feelings.

“You will not write any more of _this stuff_,” Aunt Elizabeth
contemptuously flourished “The Secret of the Castle” under Emily’s
nose. “I forbid you--remember, I forbid you.”

“Oh, I must write, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily gravely, folding her
slender, beautiful hands on the table and looking straight into Aunt
Elizabeth’s angry face with the steady, unblinking gaze which Aunt Ruth
called unchildlike. “You see, it’s this way. It is _in_ me. I can’t
help it. And Father said I was _always_ to keep on writing. He said I
would be famous some day. Wouldn’t you like to have a famous niece,
Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I am not going to argue the matter,” said Aunt Elizabeth.

“I’m not arguing--only explaining.” Emily was exasperatingly
respectful. “I just want you to understand how it is that I _have_
to go on writing stories, even though I am so very sorry you don’t
approve.”

“If you don’t give up this--this worse than nonsense, Emily,
I’ll--I’ll--”

Aunt Elizabeth stopped, not knowing what to say she would do. Emily
was too big now to be slapped or shut up; and it was no use to say,
as she was tempted to, “I’ll send you away from New Moon,” because
Elizabeth Murray knew perfectly well she would not send Emily away from
New Moon--_could_ not send her away, indeed, though this knowledge
was as yet only in her feelings and had not been translated into her
intellect. She only felt that she was helpless and it angered her;
but Emily was mistress of the situation and calmly went on writing
stories. If Aunt Elizabeth had asked her to give up crocheting lace or
making molasses taffy, or eating Aunt Laura’s delicious drop cookies,
Emily would have done so wholly and cheerfully, though she loved
these things. But to give up writing stories--why, Aunt Elizabeth
might as well have asked her to give up breathing. _Why_ couldn’t she
understand? It seemed so simple and indisputable to Emily.

“Teddy can’t help making pictures and Ilse can’t help reciting and I
can’t help writing. _Don’t_ you see, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I see that you are an ungrateful and disobedient child,” said Aunt
Elizabeth.

This hurt Emily horribly, but she could not give in; and there
continued to be a sense of soreness and disapproval between her and
Aunt Elizabeth in all the little details of daily life that poisoned
existence more or less for the child, who was so keenly sensitive to
her environment and to the feelings with which her kindred regarded
her. Emily felt it all the time--except when she was writing her
stories. _Then_ she forgot everything, roaming in some enchanted
country between the sun and moon, where she saw wonderful beings whom
she tried to describe and wonderful deeds which she tried to record,
coming back to the candle-lit kitchen with a somewhat dazed sense of
having been years in No-Man’s Land.

She did not even have Aunt Laura to back her up in the matter. Aunt
Laura thought Emily ought to yield in such an unimportant matter and
please Aunt Elizabeth.

“But it’s not unimportant,” said Emily despairingly. “It’s the most
important thing in the world to me, Aunt Laura. Oh, I thought _you_
would understand.”

“I understand that you like to do it, dear, and I think it’s a harmless
enough amusement. But it seems to annoy Elizabeth some way and I do
think you might give it up on that account. It is not as if it was
anything that mattered much--it _is_ really a waste of time.”

“No--no,” said distressed Emily. “Why, some day, Aunt Laura, I’ll
write real books--and make lots of money,” she added, sensing that the
businesslike Murrays measured the nature of most things on a cash basis.

Aunt Laura smiled indulgently.

“I’m afraid you’ll never grow rich that way, dear. It would be wiser to
employ your time preparing yourself for some useful work.”

It was maddening to be condescended to like this--maddening that nobody
could see that she _had_ to write--maddening to have Aunt Laura so
sweet and loving and stupid about it.

“Oh,” thought Emily bitterly, “if that hateful _Enterprise_ editor had
printed my piece they’d have believed _then_.”

“At any rate,” advised Aunt Laura, “don’t let Elizabeth _see_ you
writing them.”

But somehow Emily could not take this prudent advice. There _had_
been occasions when she had connived with Aunt Laura to hoodwink
Aunt Elizabeth on some little matter, but she found she could not do
it in this. _This_ had to be open and above-board. She _must_ write
stories--and Aunt Elizabeth _must_ know it--that was the way it had to
be. She could not be false to herself in this--she could not _pretend_
to be false.

She wrote her father all about it--poured out her bitterness and
perplexity to him in what, though she did not suspect it at the time,
was the last letter she was to write him. There was a large bundle
of letters by now on the old sofa shelf in the garret--for Emily had
written many letters to her father besides those which have been
chronicled in this history. There were a great many paragraphs about
Aunt Elizabeth in them, most of them very uncomplimentary and some
of them, as Emily herself would have owned when her first bitterness
was past, overdrawn and exaggerated. They had been written in moments
when her hurt and angry soul demanded some outlet for its emotion and
barbed her pen with venom. Emily was mistress of a subtly malicious
style when she chose to be. After she had written them the hurt had
ceased and she thought no more about them. But they remained.

And one spring day, Aunt Elizabeth, housecleaning in the garret while
Emily played happily with Teddy at the Tansy Patch, found the bundle of
letters on the sofa shelf, sat down, and read them all.

Elizabeth Murray would never have read any writing belonging
to a grown person. But it never occurred to her that there was
anything dishonourable in reading the letters wherein Emily, lonely
and--sometimes--misunderstood, had poured out her heart to the father
she had loved and been loved by, so passionately and understandingly.
Aunt Elizabeth thought she had a right to know everything that this
pensioner on her bounty did, said, or thought. She read the letters
and she found out what Emily thought of her--of her, Elizabeth Murray,
autocrat unchallenged, to whom no one had ever dared to say anything
uncomplimentary. Such an experience is no pleasanter at sixty than
at sixteen. As Elizabeth Murray folded up the last letter her hands
trembled--with anger, and something underneath it that was not anger.

“Emily, your Aunt Elizabeth wants to see you in the parlour,” said
Aunt Laura, when Emily returned from the Tansy Patch, driven home by
the thin grey rain that had begun to drift over the greening fields.
Her tone--her sorrowful look--warned Emily that mischief was in the
wind. Emily had no idea what mischief--she could not recall anything
she had done recently that should bring her up before the tribunal
Aunt Elizabeth occasionally held in the parlour. It must be serious
when it was in the parlour. For reasons best known to herself Aunt
Elizabeth held super-serious interviews like this in the parlour.
Possibly it was because she felt obscurely that the photographs of
the Murrays on the walls gave her a backing she needed when dealing
with this hop-out-of-kin; for the same reason Emily detested a trial in
the parlour. She always felt on such occasions like a very small mouse
surrounded by a circle of grim cats.

Emily skipped across the big hall, pausing, in spite of her alarm, to
glance at the charming red world through the crimson glass; then pushed
open the parlour door. The room was dim, for only one of the slat
blinds was partially raised. Aunt Elizabeth was sitting bolt upright in
Grandfather Murray’s black horsehair-chair. Emily looked at her stern,
angry face first--and then at her lap.

Emily understood.

The first thing she did was to retrieve her precious letters. With the
quickness of light she sprang to Aunt Elizabeth, snatched up the bundle
and retreated to the door; there she faced Aunt Elizabeth, her face
blazing with indignation and outrage. Sacrilege had been committed--the
most sacred shrine of her soul had been profaned.

“How dare you?” she said. “How dare you touch _my private papers_, Aunt
Elizabeth?”

Aunt Elizabeth had not expected _this_. She had looked for
confusion--dismay--shame--fear--for anything but this righteous
indignation, as if _she_, forsooth, were the guilty one. She rose.

“Give me those letters, Emily.”

“No, I will not,” said Emily, white with anger, as she clasped her
hands around the bundle. “They are mine and Father’s--not yours. You
had no right to touch them. I will _never_ forgive you!”

This was turning the tables with a vengeance. Aunt Elizabeth was so
dumfounded that she hardly knew what to say or do. Worst of all, a most
unpleasant doubt of her own conduct suddenly assailed her--driven home
perhaps by the intensity and earnestness of Emily’s accusation. For
the first time in her life it occurred to Elizabeth Murray to wonder if
she had done rightly. For the first time in her life she felt ashamed;
and the shame made her furious. It was intolerable that _she_ should be
made to feel ashamed.

For the moment they faced each other, not as aunt and niece, not as
child and adult, but as two human beings each with hatred for the other
in her heart--Elizabeth Murray, tall and austere and thin-lipped; Emily
Starr, white of face, her eyes pools of black flame, her trembling arms
hugging her letters.

“So _this_ is your gratitude,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “You were a
penniless orphan--I took you to my home--I have given you shelter and
food and education and kindness--and _this_ is my thanks.”

As yet Emily’s tempest of anger and resentment prevented her from
feeling the sting of this.

“You did not _want_ to take me,” she said. “You made me draw lots and
you took me because the lot fell to you. You knew some of you had to
take me because you were the proud Murrays and couldn’t let a relation
go to an orphan asylum. Aunt Laura loves me now but you don’t. So why
should I love you?”

“Ungrateful, thankless child!”

“I’m _not_ thankless. I’ve tried to be good--I’ve tried to obey you and
please you--I do all the chores I can to help pay for my keep. And you
had _no business_ to read my letters to Father.”

“They are disgraceful letters--and must be destroyed,” said Aunt
Elizabeth.

“No,” Emily clasped them tighter. “I’d sooner burn myself. You shall
not have them, Aunt Elizabeth.”

She felt her brows drawing together--she felt the Murray look on her
face--she knew she was conquering.

Elizabeth Murray turned paler, if that were possible. There were
times when she could give the Murray look herself; it was not that
which dismayed her--it was the uncanny something which seemed to
peer out behind the Murray look that always broke her will. She
trembled--faltered--yielded.

“Keep your letters,” she said bitterly, “and scorn the old woman who
opened her home to you.”

She went out of the parlour. Emily was left mistress of the field. And
all at once her victory turned to dust and ashes in her mouth.

She went up to her own room, hid her letters in the cupboard over the
mantel, and then crept up on her bed, huddling down in a little heap
with her face buried in her pillow. She was still sore with a sense of
outrage--but underneath another pain was beginning to ache terribly.

Something in her was hurt because she had hurt Aunt Elizabeth--for
she felt that Aunt Elizabeth, under all her anger, was _hurt_. This
surprised Emily. She would have expected Aunt Elizabeth to be angry, of
course, but she would never have supposed it would affect her in any
other way. Yet she had seen something in Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes when she
had flung that last stinging sentence at her--something that spoke of
bitter hurt.

“Oh! Oh!” gasped Emily. She began to cry chokingly into her pillow. She
was so wretched that she could not get out of herself and watch her
own suffering with a sort of enjoyment in its drama--set her mind to
analyse her feelings--and when Emily was as wretched as that she was
very wretched indeed and wholly comfortless. Aunt Elizabeth would not
keep her at New Moon after a poisonous quarrel like this. She would
send her away, of course. Emily believed this. Nothing was too horrible
to believe just then. How could she live away from dear New Moon?

“And I may have to live eighty years,” Emily moaned.

But worse even than this was the remembrance of that look in Aunt
Elizabeth’s eyes.

Her own sense of outrage and sacrilege ebbed away under the
remembrance. She thought of all the things she had written her father
about Aunt Elizabeth--sharp, bitter things, some of them just, some of
them unjust. She began to feel that she should not have written them.
It was true enough that Aunt Elizabeth had not loved her--had not
wanted to take her to New Moon. But she _had_ taken her and though it
had been done in duty, not in love, the fact remained. It was no use
for her to tell herself that it wasn’t as if the letters were written
to any one living, to be seen and read by others. While she was under
Aunt Elizabeth’s roof--while she owed the food she ate and the clothes
she wore to Aunt Elizabeth--she should not say, even to her father,
harsh things of her. A Starr should not have done it.

“I must go and ask Aunt Elizabeth to forgive me,” thought Emily at
last, all the passion gone out of her and only regret and repentance
left. “I suppose she never will--she’ll hate me always now. But I must
go.”

She turned herself about--and then the door opened and Aunt Elizabeth
entered. She came across the room and stood at the side of the bed,
looking down at the grieved little face on the pillow--a face that in
the dim, rainy twilight, with its tear-stains and black shadowed eyes,
looked strangely mature and chiseled.

Elizabeth Murray was still austere and cold. Her voice sounded stern;
but she said an amazing thing.

“Emily, I had no right to read your letters. I admit I was wrong. Will
you forgive me?”

“Oh!” The word was almost a cry. Aunt Elizabeth had at last discerned
the way to conquer Emily. The latter lifted herself up, flung her arms
about Aunt Elizabeth, and said chokingly,

“Oh--Aunt Elizabeth--I’m sorry--I’m sorry--I shouldn’t have written
those things--but I wrote them when I was vexed--and I didn’t mean
them _all_--truly, I didn’t mean the worst of them. Oh, you’ll believe
_that_, won’t you, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“I’d like to believe it, Emily.” An odd quiver passed through the
tall, rigid form. “I--don’t like to think you--_hate_ me--my sister’s
child--little Juliet’s child.”

“I don’t--oh, I don’t,” sobbed Emily. “And I’ll _love_ you, Aunt
Elizabeth, if you’ll let me--if you _want_ me to. I didn’t think you
cared. _Dear_ Aunt Elizabeth.”

Emily gave Aunt Elizabeth a fierce hug and a passionate kiss on the
white, fine-wrinkled cheek. Aunt Elizabeth kissed her gravely on the
brow in return and then said, as if closing the door on the whole
incident,

“You’d better wash your face and come down to supper.”

But there was yet something to be cleared up.

“Aunt Elizabeth,” whispered Emily. “I _can’t_ burn those letters, you
know--they belong to Father. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll go
over them all and put a star by anything I said about you and then I’ll
add an explanatory footnote saying that I was mistaken.”

Emily spent her spare time for several days putting in her “explanatory
footnotes,” and then her conscience had rest. But when she again tried
to write a letter to her father she found that it no longer meant
anything to her. The sense of reality--nearness--of close communion had
gone. Perhaps she had been outgrowing it gradually, as childhood began
to merge into girlhood--perhaps the bitter scene with Aunt Elizabeth
had only shaken into dust something out of which the spirit had already
departed. But, whatever the explanation, it was not possible to write
such letters any more. She missed them terribly but she could not go
back to them. A certain door of life was shut behind her and could not
be re-opened.

CHAPTER XXX

WHEN THE CURTAIN LIFTED

It would be pleasant to be able to record that after the reconciliation
in the lookout Emily and Aunt Elizabeth lived in entire amity and
harmony. But the truth was that things went on pretty much the same as
before. Emily went softly, and tried to mingle serpent’s wisdom and
dove’s harmlessness in practical proportions, but their points of view
were so different that there were bound to be clashes; they did not
speak the same language, so there was bound to be misunderstanding.

And yet there was a difference--a very vital difference. Elizabeth
Murray had learned an important lesson--that there was not one law of
fairness for children and another for grown-ups. She continued to be
as autocratic as ever--but she did not do or say to Emily anything she
would not have done or said to Laura had occasion called for it.

Emily, on her side, had discovered the fact that, under all her surface
coldness and sternness, Aunt Elizabeth really had an affection for her;
and it was wonderful what a difference this made. It took the sting
out of Aunt Elizabeth’s “ways” and words and healed entirely a certain
little half-conscious sore spot that had been in Emily’s heart ever
since the incident of the drawn slips at Maywood.

“I don’t believe I’m a duty to Aunt Elizabeth any more,” she thought
exultantly.

Emily grew rapidly that summer in body, mind and soul. Life was
delightful, growing richer every hour, like an unfolding rose. Forms of
beauty filled her imagination and were transferred as best she could
to paper, though they were never so lovely there, and Emily had the
heartbreaking moments of the true artist who discovers that

    “Never on painter’s canvas lives
    The charm of his fancy’s dream.”

Much of her “old stuff” she burned; even the _Child of the Sea_ was
reduced to ashes. But the little pile of manuscripts in the mantel
cupboard of the lookout was growing steadily larger. Emily kept her
scribblings there now; the sofa shelf in the garret was desecrated;
and, besides, she felt somehow that Aunt Elizabeth would never meddle
with her “private papers” again, no matter where they were kept. She
did not go now to the garret to read or write or dream; her own dear
lookout was the best place for that. She loved that quaint, little old
room intensely; it was almost like a living thing to her--a sharer in
gladness--a comforter in sorrow.

Ilse was growing, too, blossoming out into strange beauty and
brilliance, knowing no law but her own pleasure, recognizing no
authority but her own whim. Aunt Laura worried over her.

“She will be a woman so soon--and _who_ will look after her? Allan
won’t.”

“I’ve no patience with Allan,” said Aunt Elizabeth grimly. “He is
always ready to hector and advise other people. He’d better look at
home. He’ll come over here and order me to do this or that, or _not_ to
do it, for Emily; but if I say one word to him about Ilse he blows the
roof off. The idea of a man turning against his daughter and neglecting
her as he has neglected Ilse simply because her mother wasn’t all she
ought to be--as if the poor child was to blame for _that_.”

“S--s--sh,” said Aunt Laura, as Emily crossed the sitting-room on her
way upstairs.

Emily smiled sadly to herself. Aunt Laura needn’t be “s-s-sh’ing.”
There was nothing left for her to find out about Ilse’s
mother--nothing, except the most important thing of all, which neither
she nor anybody else living knew. For Emily had never surrendered her
conviction that the whole truth about Beatrice Burnley was not known.
She often worried about it when she lay curled up in her black walnut
bed o’nights, listening to the moan of the gulf and the Wind Woman
singing in the trees, and drifted into sleep wishing intensely that she
could solve the dark old mystery and dissolve its legend of shame and
bitterness.

Emily went rather languidly upstairs to the lookout. She meant to
write some more of her story, _The Ghost of the Well_, wherein she
was weaving the old legend of the well in the Lee field; but somehow
interest was lacking; she put the manuscript back into the mantel
cupboard; she read over a letter from Dean Priest which had come that
day, one of his fat, jolly, whimsical, delightful letters wherein he
had told her that he was coming to stay a month with his sister at
Blair Water. She wondered why this announcement did not excite her
more. She was tired--her head was aching. Emily couldn’t remember ever
having had a headache before. Since she could not write she decided to
lie down and be _Lady Trevanion_ for awhile. Emily was _Lady Trevanion_
very often that summer, in one of the dream lives she had begun to
build up for herself. _Lady Trevanion_ was the wife of an English earl
and, besides being a famous novelist, was a member of the British House
of Commons--where she always appeared in black velvet with a stately
coronet of pearls on her dark hair. She was the only woman in the House
and, as this was before the days of the suffragettes, she had to endure
many sneers and innuendoes and insults from the ungallant males around
her. Emily’s favourite dream scene was where she rose to make her first
speech--a wonderfully thrilling event. As Emily found it difficult
to do justice to the scene in any ideas of her own, she always fell
back on “Pitt’s reply to Walpole,” which she had found in her _Royal
Reader_, and declaimed it, with suitable variations. The insolent
speaker who had provoked _Lady Trevanion_ into speech had sneered at
her as a _woman_, and _Lady Trevanion_, a magnificent creature in her
velvet and pearls, rose to her feet, amid hushed and dramatic silence,
and said,

“The atrocious crime of being a _woman_ which the honourable member
has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall attempt
neither to palliate nor deny, but shall content myself with wishing
that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their _sex_ and
_not_ one of that number who are ignorant in spite of _manhood_ and
experience.”

(Here she was always interrupted by thunders of applause.)

But the savour was entirely lacking in this scene today and by the
time Emily had reached the line, “But _womanhood_, Sir, is not my only
crime”--she gave up in disgust and fell to worrying over Ilse’s mother
again, mixed up with some uneasy speculations regarding the climax of
her story about the ghost of the well, mingled with her unpleasant
physical sensations.

Her eyes hurt her when she moved them. She was chilly, although the
July day was hot. She was still lying there when Aunt Elizabeth came up
to ask why she hadn’t gone to bring the cows home from the pasture.

“I--I didn’t know it was so late,” said Emily confusedly. “I--my head
aches, Aunt Elizabeth.”

Aunt Elizabeth rolled up the white cotton blind and looked at Emily.
She noted her flushed face--she felt her pulse. Then she bade her
shortly to stay where she was, went down, and sent Perry for Dr.
Burnley.

“Probably she’s got the measles,” said the doctor as gruffly as usual.
Emily was not yet sick enough to be gentle over. “There’s an outbreak
of them at Derry Pond. Has she had any chance to catch them?”

“Jimmy Joe Belle’s two children were here one afternoon about ten days
ago. She played with them--she’s always playing round with people
she’s no business to associate with. I haven’t heard that they were or
have been sick though.”

Jimmy Joe Belle, when asked plainly, confessed that his “young ones”
had come out with measles the very day after they had been at New Moon.
There was therefore not much doubt as to Emily’s malady.

“It’s a bad kind of measles apparently,” the doctor said. “Quite a
number of the Derry Pond children have died of it. Mostly French
though--the kids would be out of bed when they had no business to be
and caught cold. I don’t think you need worry about Emily. She might as
well have measles and be done with it. Keep her warm and keep the room
dark. I’ll run over in the morning.”

For three or four days nobody was much alarmed. Measles was a disease
everybody had to have. Aunt Elizabeth looked after Emily well and slept
on a sofa which had been moved into the lookout. She even left the
window open at night. In spite of this--perhaps Aunt Elizabeth thought
because of it--Emily grew steadily sicker, and on the fifth day a sharp
change for the worse took place. Her fever went up rapidly, delirium
set in; Dr. Burnley came, looked anxious, scowled, changed the medicine.

“I’m sent for to a bad case of pneumonia at White Cross,” he said, “and
I have to go to Charlottetown in the morning to be present at Mrs.
Jackwell’s operation. I promised her I would go. I’ll be back in the
evening. Emily is very restless--that high-strung system of hers is
evidently very sensitive to fever. What’s that nonsense she’s talking
about the Wind Woman?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Aunt Elizabeth worriedly. “She’s always
talking nonsense like that, even when she’s well. Allan, tell me
plainly--is there any danger?”

“There’s always danger in this type of measles. I don’t like these
symptoms--the eruption should be out by now and there’s no sign of
it. Her fever is very high--but I don’t think we need be alarmed
yet. If I thought otherwise I wouldn’t go to town. Keep her as quiet
as possible--humour her whims if you can--I don’t like that mental
disturbance. She looks terribly distressed--seems to be worrying over
something. Has she had anything on her mind of late?”

“Not that I know of,” said Aunt Elizabeth. She had a sudden bitter
realisation that she really did not know much about the child’s mind.
Emily would never have come to her with any of her little troubles and
worries.

“Emily, what is bothering you?” asked Dr. Burnley softly--very softly.
He took the hot, tossing, little hand gently, oh, so gently, in his big
one.

Emily looked up with wild, fever-bright eyes.

“She couldn’t have done it--she _couldn’t_ have done it.”

“Of course she couldn’t,” said the doctor cheerily. “Don’t worry--she
didn’t do it.”

His eyes telegraphed, “What does she mean?” to Elizabeth, but Elizabeth
shook her head.

“Who are you talking about--dear?” she asked Emily. It was the first
time she had called Emily “dear.”

But Emily was off on another tack. The well in Mr. Lee’s field was
open, she declared. Someone would be sure to fall into it. Why didn’t
Mr. Lee shut it up? Dr. Burnley left Aunt Elizabeth trying to reassure
Emily on that point and hurried away to White Cross.

At the door he nearly fell over Perry who was curled up on the
sandstone slab, hugging his sunburned legs desperately. “How is Emily?”
he demanded, grasping the skirt of the doctor’s coat.

“Don’t bother me--I’m in a hurry,” growled the doctor.

“You tell me how Emily is or I’ll hang on to your coat till the seams
go,” said Perry stubbornly. “I can’t get one word of sense out of them
old maids. _You_ tell me.”

“She’s a sick child but I’m not seriously alarmed about her yet.” The
doctor gave his coat another tug--but Perry held on for a last word.

“You’ve _got_ to cure her,” he said. “If anything happens to Emily I’ll
drown myself in the pond--mind that.”

He let go so suddenly that Dr. Burnley nearly went headlong on the
ground. Then Perry curled up on the doorstep again. He watched there
until Laura and Cousin Jimmy had gone to bed and then he sneaked
through the house and sat on the stairs, where he could hear any sound
in Emily’s room. He sat there all night, with his fists clenched, as if
keeping guard against an unseen foe.

Elizabeth Murray watched by Emily until two o’clock, and then Laura
took her place.

“She has raved a great deal,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “I wish I knew what
is worrying her--there _is_ something, I feel sure. It isn’t all mere
delirium. She keeps repeating ‘She couldn’t have done it’ in such
imploring tones. I wonder oh, Laura, you remember the time I read her
letters? Do you think she means me?”

Laura shook her head. She had never seen Elizabeth so moved.

“If the child--doesn’t get--better--” said Aunt Elizabeth. She said no
more but went quickly out of the room.

Laura sat down by the bed. She was pale and drawn with her own worry
and fatigue--for she had not been able to sleep. She loved Emily as
her own child and the awful dread that had possessed her heart would
not lift for an instant. She sat there and prayed mutely. Emily fell
into a troubled slumber which lasted until the grey dawn crept into
the lookout. Then she opened her eyes and looked at Aunt Laura--looked
through her--looked beyond her.

“I see her coming over the fields,” she said in a high, clear voice.
“She is coming so gladly--she is singing--she is thinking of her
baby--oh, keep her back--keep her back--she doesn’t see the well--it’s
so dark she doesn’t see it--oh, she’s gone into it--she’s gone into it!”

Emily’s voice rose in a piercing shriek which penetrated to Aunt
Elizabeth’s room and brought her flying across the hall in her flannel
nightgown.

“What is wrong, Laura?” she gasped.

Laura was trying to soothe Emily, who was struggling to sit up in bed.
Her cheeks were crimson and her eyes had still the same far, wild look.

“Emily--Emily, darling, you’ve just had a bad dream. The old Lee well
isn’t open--nobody has fallen into it.”

“Yes, somebody has,” said Emily shrilly. “_She_ has--I saw her--I saw
her--with the ace of hearts on her forehead. Do you think I don’t know
her?”

She fell back on her pillow, moaned, and tossed the hands which Laura
Murray had loosened in her surprise.

The two ladies of New Moon looked at each other across her bed in
dismay--and something like terror.

“Who did you see, Emily?” asked Aunt Elizabeth.

“Ilse’s mother--of course. I always knew she didn’t do that dreadful
thing. She fell into the old well--she’s there now--go--go and get her
out, Aunt Laura. _Please._”

“Yes--yes, of course we’ll get her out, darling,” said Aunt Laura,
soothingly.

Emily sat up in bed and looked at Aunt Laura again. This time she did
not look through her--she looked into her. Laura Murray felt that
those burning eyes read her soul.

“You are lying to me,” cried Emily. “You don’t mean to try to get
her out. You are only saying it to put me off. Aunt Elizabeth,” she
suddenly turned and caught Aunt Elizabeth’s hand, “you’ll do it for me,
won’t you? You’ll go and get her out of the old well, won’t you?”

Elizabeth remembered that Dr. Burnley had said that Emily’s whims must
be humoured. She was terrified by the child’s condition.

“Yes, I’ll get her out if she is in there,” she said. Emily released
her hand and sank down. The wild glare left her eyes. A great sudden
calm fell over her anguished little face.

“I know _you’ll_ keep your word,” she said. “You are very hard--but
_you_ never lie, Aunt Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth Murray went back to her own room and dressed herself with her
shaking fingers. A little later, when Emily had fallen into a quiet
sleep, Laura went down stairs and heard Elizabeth giving Cousin Jimmy
some orders in the kitchen.

“Elizabeth, you don’t really mean to have that old well searched?”

“I do,” said Elizabeth resolutely. “I know it’s nonsense as well as
you do. But I had to promise it to quiet her down--and I’ll keep my
promise. You heard what she said--she believed I wouldn’t lie to her.
Nor will I. Jimmy, you will go over to James Lee’s after breakfast and
ask him to come here.”

“How has she heard the story?” said Laura.

“I don’t know--oh, some one has told her, of course--perhaps that old
demon of a Nancy Priest. It doesn’t matter who. She _has_ heard it
and the thing is to keep her quiet. It isn’t so much of a job to put
ladders in the well and get some one to go down it. The thing that
matters is the absurdity of it.”

“We’ll be laughed at for a pair of fools,” protested Laura, whose share
of Murray pride was in hot revolt. “And besides, it will open up all
the old scandal again.”

“No matter. I’ll keep my word to the child,” said Elizabeth stubbornly.

Allan Burnley came to New Moon at sunset, on his way home from town. He
was tired, for he had been going night and day for over a week; he was
more worried than he had admitted over Emily; he looked old and rather
desolate as he stepped into the New Moon kitchen.

Only Cousin Jimmy was there. Cousin Jimmy did not seem to have much to
do, although it was a good hay-day and Jimmy Joe Belle and Perry were
hauling in the great fragrant, sun-dried loads. He sat by the western
window with a strange expression on his face.

“Hello, Jimmy, where are the girls? And how is Emily?”

“Emily is better,” said Cousin Jimmy. “The rash is out and her fever
has gone down. I think she’s asleep.”

“Good. We couldn’t afford to lose that little girl, could we, Jimmy?”

“No,” said Jimmy. But he did not seem to want to talk about it. “Laura
and Elizabeth are in the sitting-room. They want to see you.” He paused
a minute and then added in an eerie way, “There is nothing hidden that
shall not be revealed.”

It occurred to Allan Burnley that Jimmy was acting mysteriously. And
if Laura and Elizabeth wanted to see him why didn’t they come out? It
wasn’t like them to stand on ceremony in this fashion. He pushed open
the sitting-room door impatiently.

Laura Murray was sitting on the sofa, leaning her head on its arm. He
could not see her face but he felt that she was crying. Elizabeth
was sitting bolt upright on a chair. She wore her second-best black
silk and her second-best lace cap. And she, too, had been crying. Dr.
Burnley never attached much importance to Laura’s tears, easy as those
of most women, but that Elizabeth Murray should cry--had he ever seen
her cry before?

The thought of Ilse flashed into his mind--his little neglected
daughter. Had anything happened to Ilse?

In one dreadful moment Allan Burnley paid the price of his treatment of
his child.

“What is wrong?” he exclaimed in his gruffest manner.

“Oh, Allan,” said Elizabeth Murray. “God forgive us--God forgive us
all!”

“It--is--Ilse,” said Dr. Burnley, dully.

“No--no--not Ilse.”

Then she told him--she told him what had been found at the bottom of
the old Lee well--she told him what had been the real fate of the
lovely, laughing young wife whose name for twelve bitter years had
never crossed his lips.

It was not until the next evening that Emily saw the doctor. She was
lying in bed, weak and limp, red as a beet with the measles rash, but
quite herself again. Allan Burnley stood by the bed and looked down at
her.

“Emily--dear little child--do you know what you have done for me? God
knows how you did it.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Emily, wonderingly.

“You have given me back my faith in Him, Emily.”

“Why, what have I done?”

Dr. Burnley saw that she had no remembrance of her delirium. Laura had
told him that she had slept long and soundly after Elizabeth’s promise
and had awakened with fever gone and the eruption fast coming out. She
had asked nothing and they had said nothing.

“When you are better we will tell you all,” he said, smiling down at
her. There was something very sorrowful in the smile--and yet something
very sweet.

“He is smiling with his eyes as well as his mouth now,” thought Emily.

“How--how did she know?” whispered Laura Murray to him when he went
down. “I--can’t understand it, Allan.”

“Nor I. These things are beyond us, Laura,” he answered gravely. “I
only know this child has given Beatrice back to me, stainless and
beloved. It can be explained rationally enough perhaps. Emily has
evidently been told about Beatrice and worried over it--her repeated
‘she couldn’t have done it’ shows that. And the tales of the old Lee
well naturally made a deep impression on the mind of a sensitive child
keenly alive to dramatic values. In her delirium she mixed this all up
with the well-known fact of Jimmy’s tumble into the New Moon well--and
the rest was coincidence. I would have explained it all so myself
once--but now--now, Laura, I only say humbly, ‘A little child shall
lead them.’”

“Our stepmother’s mother was a Highland Scotchwoman. They said she had
the second sight,” said Elizabeth. “I never believed in it--before.”

The excitement of Blair Water had died away before Emily was deemed
strong enough to hear the story. That which had been found in the old
Lee well had been buried in the Mitchell plot at Shrewsbury and a
white marble shaft, “Sacred to the memory of Beatrice Burnley, beloved
wife of Allan Burnley,” had been erected. The sensation caused by Dr.
Burnley’s presence every Sunday in the old Burnley pew had died away.
On the first evening that Emily was allowed to sit up Aunt Laura told
her the whole story. Her manner of telling stripped it forever of the
taint and innuendo left by Aunt Nancy.

“I _knew_ Ilse’s mother couldn’t have done it,” said Emily triumphantly.

“We blame ourselves now for our lack of faith,” said Aunt Laura. “We
should have known too--but it _did_ seem black against her at the time,
Emily. She was a bright, beautiful, merry creature--we thought her
close friendship with her cousin natural and harmless. We know now it
was so--but all these years since her disappearance we have believed
differently. Mr. James Lee remembers clearly that the well was open
the night of Beatrice’s disappearance. His hired man had taken the
old rotten planks off it that evening, intending to put the new ones
on at once. Then Robert Greerson’s house caught fire and he ran with
everybody else to help save it. By the time it was out it was too dark
to finish with the well, and the man said nothing about it until the
morning. Mr. Lee was angry with him--he said it was a scandalous thing
to leave a well uncovered like that. He went right down and put the
new planks in place himself. He did not look down in the well--had he
looked he could have seen nothing, for the ferns growing out from the
sides screened the depths. It was just after harvest. No one was in
the field again before the next spring. He never connected Beatrice’s
disappearance with the open well--he wonders now that he didn’t. But
you see--dear--there had been much malicious gossip--and Beatrice was
_known_ to have gone on board _The Lady of Winds_. It was taken for
granted she never came off again. But she did--and went to her death
in the old Lee field. It was a dreadful ending to her bright young
life--but not so dreadful, after all, as what we believed. For twelve
years we have wronged the dead. But--Emily--how could you _know_?”

“I--don’t--know. When the doctor came in that day I couldn’t remember
anything--but now it seems to me that I remember something--just as
if I’d dreamed it--of _seeing_ Ilse’s mother coming over the fields,
singing. It was dark--and yet I could see the ace of hearts--oh, Aunty,
I don’t know--I don’t like to think of it, some way.”

“We won’t talk of it again,” said Aunt Laura gently. “It is one of the
things best not talked of--one of God’s secrets.”

“And Ilse--does her father love her now?” asked Emily eagerly.

“Love her! He can’t love her enough. It seems as if he were pouring out
on her at once all the shut-up love of those twelve years.”

“He’ll likely spoil her now as much with indulgence as he did before
with neglect,” said Elizabeth, coming in with Emily’s supper in time to
hear Laura’s reply.

“It will take a lot of love to spoil Ilse,” laughed Laura. “She’s
drinking it up like a thirsty sponge. And she loves him wildly in
return. There isn’t a trace of grudge in her over his long neglect.”

“All the same,” said Elizabeth grimly, tucking pillows behind Emily’s
back with a very gentle hand, oddly in contrast with her severe
expression, “he won’t get off so easily. Ilse has run wild for twelve
years. He won’t find it so easy to make her behave properly now--if he
ever does.”

“Love will do wonders,” said Aunt Laura softly. “Of course, Ilse is
dying to come and see you, Emily. But she must wait until there is no
danger of infection. I told her she might write--but when she found I
would have to read it because of your eyes she said she’d wait till you
could read it yourself. Evidently”--Laura laughed again--“evidently
Ilse has much of importance to tell you.”

“I didn’t know anybody could be as happy as I am now,” said Emily.
“And oh, Aunt Elizabeth, it is _so_ nice to feel hungry again and to
have something to _chew_.”

CHAPTER XXXI

EMILY’S GREAT MOMENT

Emily’s convalescence was rather slow. Physically she recovered with
normal celerity but a certain spiritual and emotional languor persisted
for a time. One cannot go down to the depths of hidden things and
escape the penalty. Aunt Elizabeth said she “moped.” But Emily was
too happy and contented to mope. It was just that life seemed to have
lost its savour for a time, as if some spring of vital energy had been
drained out of it and refilled slowly.

She had, just then, no one to play with. Perry, Ilse and Teddy had
all come down with measles the same day. Mrs. Kent at first declared
bitterly that Teddy had caught them at New Moon, but all three had
contracted them at a Sunday School picnic where Derry Pond children had
been. That picnic infected all Blair Water. There was a perfect orgy of
measles. Teddy and Ilse were only moderately ill, but Perry, who had
insisted on going home to Aunt Tom at the first symptoms, nearly died.
Emily was not allowed to know his danger until it had passed, lest
it worry her too much. Even Aunt Elizabeth worried over it. She was
surprised to discover how much they missed Perry round the place.

It was fortunate for Emily that Dean Priest was in Blair Water during
this forlorn time. His companionship was just what she needed and
helped her wonderfully on the road to complete recovery. They went for
long walks together all over Blair Water, with Tweed woofing around
them, and explored places and roads Emily had never seen before. They
watched a young moon grow old, night by night; they talked in dim
scented chambers of twilight over long red roads of mystery; they
followed the lure of hill winds; they saw the stars rise and Dean told
her all about them--the great constellations of the old myths. It
was a wonderful month; but on the first day of Teddy’s convalescence
Emily was off to the Tansy Patch for the afternoon and Jarback Priest
walked--if he walked at all--alone.

Aunt Elizabeth was extremely polite to him, though she did not like the
Priests of Priest Pond overmuch, and never felt quite comfortable under
the mocking gleam of “Jarback’s” green eyes and the faint derision of
his smile, which seemed to make Murray pride and Murray traditions seem
much less important than they really were.

“He has the Priest flavour,” she told Laura, “though it isn’t as strong
in him as in most of them. And he’s certainly helping Emily--she has
begun to spunk up since he came.”

Emily continued to “spunk up” and by September, when the measles
epidemic was spent and Dean Priest had gone on one of his sudden swoops
over to Europe for the autumn, she was ready for school again--a
little taller, a little thinner, a little less childlike, with great
grey shadowy eyes that had looked into death and read the riddle of a
buried thing, and henceforth would hold in them some haunting, elusive
remembrance of that world behind the veil. Dean Priest had seen it--Mr.
Carpenter saw it when she smiled at him across her desk at school.

“She’s left the childhood of her soul behind, though she is still a
child in body,” he muttered.

One afternoon amid the golden days and hazes of October he asked her
gruffly to let him see some of her verses.

“I never meant to encourage you in it,” he said. “I don’t mean it
now. Probably you can’t write a line of real poetry and never will.
But let me see your stuff. If it’s hopelessly bad I’ll tell you so. I
won’t have you wasting years striving for the unattainable--at least
I won’t have it on my conscience if you do. If there’s any promise in
it, I’ll tell you so just as honestly. And bring some of your stories,
too--_they’re_ trash yet, that’s certain, but I’ll see if they show
just and sufficient cause for going on.”

Emily spent a very solemn hour that evening, weighing, choosing,
rejecting. To the little bundle of verse she added one of her
Jimmy-books which contained, as she thought, her best stories. She went
to school next day, so secret and mysterious that Ilse took offense,
started in to call her names--and then stopped. Ilse had promised her
father that she would try to break herself of the habit of calling
names. She was making fairly good headway and her conversation, if less
vivid, was beginning to approximate to New Moon standards.

Emily made a sad mess of her lessons that day. She was nervous and
frightened. She had a tremendous respect for Mr. Carpenter’s opinion.
Father Cassidy had told her to keep on--Dean Priest had told her that
some day she might really write--but perhaps they were only trying
to be encouraging because they liked her and didn’t want to hurt her
feelings. Emily knew Mr. Carpenter would not do this. No matter if he
did like her he would nip her aspirations mercilessly if he thought
the root of the matter was not in her. If, on the contrary, he bade
her God-speed, she would rest content with that against the world and
never lose heart in the face of any future criticism. No wonder the day
seemed fraught with tremendous issues to Emily.

When school was out Mr. Carpenter asked her to remain. She was so
white and tense that the other pupils thought she must have been found
out by Mr. Carpenter in some especially dreadful behaviour and knew
she was going to “catch it.” Rhoda Stuart flung her a significantly
malicious smile from the porch--which Emily never even saw. She was,
indeed, at a momentous bar, with Mr. Carpenter as supreme judge, and
her whole future career--so she believed--hanging on his verdict.

The pupils disappeared and a mellow sunshiny stillness settled over
the old schoolroom. Mr. Carpenter took the little packet she had given
him in the morning out of his desk, came down the aisle and sat in the
seat before her, facing her. Very deliberately he settled his glasses
astride his hooked nose, took out her manuscripts and began to read--or
rather to glance over them, flinging scraps of comments, mingled with
grunts, sniffs and hoots, at her as he glanced. Emily folded her cold
hands on her desk and braced her feet against the legs of it to keep
her knees from trembling. This was a very terrible experience. She
wished she had never given her verses to Mr. Carpenter. They were
no good--of course they were no good. Remember the editor of the
_Enterprise_.

“Humph!” said Mr. Carpenter. “_Sunset_--Lord, how many poems have been
written on ‘Sunset’--

    ‘The clouds are massed in splendid state
    At heaven’s unbarred western gate
    Where troops of star-eyed spirits wait’--

By gad, what does that mean?”

“I--I--don’t know,” faltered startled Emily, whose wits had been
scattered by the sudden swoop of his spiked glance.

Mr. Carpenter snorted.

“For heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write what you can’t understand
yourself. And this--_To Life_--‘Life, as thy gift I ask no rainbow
joy’--is that sincere? Is it, girl. Stop and think. _Do_ you ask ‘no
rainbow joy’ of life?”

He transfixed her with another glare. But Emily was beginning to pick
herself up a bit. Nevertheless, she suddenly felt oddly ashamed of the
very elevated and unselfish desires expressed in that sonnet.

“No--o,” she answered reluctantly. “I _do_ want rainbow joy--lots of
it.”

“Of course you do. We all do. We don’t get it--you won’t get it--but
don’t be hypocrite enough to pretend you don’t want it, even in a
sonnet. _Lines to a Mountain Cascade_-- ‘On its dark rocks like the
whiteness of a veil around a bride’--Where did you see a mountain
cascade in Prince Edward Island?”

“Nowhere--there’s a picture of one in Dr. Burnley’s library.”

“_A Wood Stream_--

    ‘The threading sunbeams quiver,
    The bending bushes shiver,
    O’er the little shadowy river’--

There’s only one more rhyme that occurs to me and that’s ‘liver.’ Why
did you leave it out?”

Emily writhed.

“_Wind Song_--

       ‘I have shaken the dew in the meadows
    From the clover’s creamy gown’--

Pretty, but weak. _June_--June, for heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write
poetry on June. It’s the sickliest subject in the world. It’s been
written to death.”

“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle
replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr.
Carpenter have it all his own way.

But Mr. Carpenter had tossed _June_ aside without reading a line of it.

“‘I weary of the hungry world’--what do you know of the hungry
world?--you in your New Moon seclusion of old trees and old maids--but
it _is_ hungry. _Ode to Winter_--the seasons are a sort of disease all
young poets must have, it seems--ha! ‘Spring will not forget’--_that’s_
a good line--the only good line in it. H’m’m--_Wanderings_--

    ‘I’ve learned the secret of the rune
    That the somber pines on the hillside croon’--

Have you--_have_ you learned that secret?”

“I think I’ve always known it,” said Emily dreamily. That flash of
unimaginable sweetness that sometimes surprised her had just come and
gone.

“_Aim and Endeavour_--too didactic--too didactic. You’ve no right to
try to teach until you’re old--and then you won’t want to--

    ‘Her face was like a star all pale and fair’--

Were you looking in the glass when you composed that line?”

“No--” indignantly.

“‘When the morning light is shaken like a banner on the hill’--a good
line--a good line--

    ‘Oh, on such a golden morning
    To be living is delight’--

Too much like a faint echo of Wordsworth. _The Sea in September_--‘blue
and austerely bright’--‘austerely bright’--child, how can you marry the
right adjectives like that? _Morning_--‘all the secret fears that haunt
the night’--what do _you_ know of the fears that haunt the night?”

“I know something,” said Emily decidedly, remembering her first night
at Wyther Grange.

“_To a Dead Day_--

    ‘With the chilly calm on her brow
    That only the dead may wear’--

Have you ever _seen_ the chilly calm on the brow of the dead, Emily?”

“Yes,” said Emily softly, recalling that grey dawn in the old house in
the hollow.

“I thought so--otherwise you couldn’t have written _that_--and even as
it is--how old are you, jade?”

“Thirteen, last May.”

“Humph! _Lines to Mrs. George Irving’s Infant Son_--you should study
the art of titles, Emily--there’s a fashion in them as in everything
else. Your titles are as out of date as the candles of New Moon--

    ‘Soundly he sleeps with his red lips pressed
    Like a beautiful blossom close to her breast’--

The rest isn’t worth reading. _September_--is there a month you’ve
missed?--‘Windy meadows harvest-deep’--good line. _Blair Water by
Moonlight_--gossamer, Emily, nothing but gossamer. _The Garden of New
Moon_--

    ‘Beguiling laughter and old song
    Of merry maids and men’--

Good line--I suppose New Moon _is_ full of ghosts. ‘Death’s fell minion
well fulfilled its part’--that might have passed in Addison’s day but
not now--not now, Emily--

    ‘Your azure dimples are the graves
    Where million buried sunbeams play’--

Atrocious, girl--atrocious. Graves aren’t playgrounds. How much would
_you_ play if you were buried?”

Emily writhed and blushed again. _Why_ couldn’t she have seen that
herself? _Any_ goose could have seen it.

    “‘Sail onward, ships--white wings, sail on,
    Till past the horizon’s purple bar
    You drift from sight.--In flush of dawn
    Sail on, and ’neath the evening star’--

Trash--trash--and yet there’s a picture in it--

    ‘Lap softly, purple waves. I dream,
    And dreams are sweet--I’ll wake no more’--

Ah, but you’ll have to wake if you want to accomplish anything. Girl,
you’ve used _purple_ twice in the same poem.

    ‘Buttercups in a golden frenzy’--

‘a golden frenzy’--girl, I _see_ the wind shaking the buttercups.

    ‘From the purple gates of the west I come’--

You’re too fond of purple, Emily.”

“It’s such a lovely word,” said Emily.

    “‘Dreams that seem too bright to die’--

_Seem_ but never _are_, Emily--

    ‘The luring voice of the echo, fame’--

So you’ve heard it, too? It _is_ a lure and for most of us only an
echo. And that’s the last of the lot.”

Mr. Carpenter swept the little sheets aside, folded his arms on the
desk, and looked over his glasses at Emily.

Emily looked back at him mutely, nervelessly. All the life seemed to
have been drained out of her body and concentrated in her eyes.

“Ten good lines out of four hundred, Emily--comparatively good, that
is--and all the rest balderdash--balderdash, Emily.”

“I--suppose so,” said Emily faintly.

Her eyes brimmed with tears--her lips quivered. She could not help it.
Pride was hopelessly submerged in the bitterness of her disappointment.
She felt exactly like a candle that somebody had blown out.

“What are you crying for?” demanded Mr. Carpenter.

Emily blinked away the tears and tried to laugh.

“I--I’m sorry--you think it’s no good--” she said.

Mr. Carpenter gave the desk a mighty thump.

“No good! Didn’t I tell you there were ten good lines? Jade, for ten
righteous men Sodom had been spared.”

“Do you mean--that--after all--” The candle was being relighted again.

“Of course, I mean. If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at
twenty you’ll write ten times ten--if the gods are kind. Stop messing
over months, though--and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you
_have_ written ten decent lines. I think there’s _something_ trying to
speak through you--but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument
for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice--by gad, girl, you’ve
chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go--not even
when she shuts her ears forever to their plea. What have you there?”

Emily, her heart thrilling, handed him her Jimmy-book. She was so happy
that it shone through her whole being with a positive radiance. She
saw her future, wonderful, brilliant--oh, her goddess would listen to
_her_--“Emily B. Starr, the distinguished poet”--“E. Byrd Starr, the
rising young novelist”--

She was recalled from her enchanting reverie by a chuckle from Mr.
Carpenter. Emily wondered a little uneasily what he was laughing at.
She didn’t think there was anything funny in _that_ book. It contained
only three or four of her latest stories--_The Butterfly Queen_, a
little fairy tale; _The Disappointed House_, wherein she had woven a
pretty dream of hopes come true after long years; _The Secret of the
Glen_, which, in spite of its title, was a fanciful little dialogue
between the Spirit of the Snow, the Spirit of the Grey Rain, the
Spirit of Mist, and the Spirit of Moonshine.

“So you think I am not beautiful when I say my prayers?” said Mr.
Carpenter.

Emily gasped--realized what had happened--made a frantic grab at her
Jimmy-book--missed it. Mr. Carpenter held it up beyond her reach and
mocked at her.

She had given him the wrong Jimmy-book! And this one, oh, horrors,
what was in it? Or rather, what wasn’t in it? Sketches of everyone in
Blair Water--and a full--a very full--description of Mr. Carpenter
himself. Intent on describing him exactly, she had been as mercilessly
lucid as she always was, especially in regard to the odd faces he
made on mornings when he opened the school day with a prayer. Thanks
to her dramatic knack of word painting, Mr. Carpenter _lived_ in that
sketch. Emily did not know it, but _he_ did--he saw himself as in a
glass and the artistry of it pleased him so that he cared for nothing
else. Besides, she had drawn his good points quite as clearly as his
bad ones. And there were some sentences in it--“He looks as if he knew
a great deal that can never be any use to him”--“I think he wears the
black coat Mondays because it makes him feel that he hasn’t been drunk
at all.” Who or what had taught the little jade these things? Oh, her
goddess would not pass Emily by!

“I’m--sorry,” said Emily, crimson with shame all over her dainty
paleness.

“Why, I wouldn’t have missed this for all the poetry you’ve written or
ever will write! By gad, it’s literature--_literature_--and you’re only
thirteen. But you don’t know what’s ahead of you--the stony hills--the
steep ascents--the buffets--the discouragements. Stay in the valley if
you’re wise. Emily, _why_ do you want to write? Give me your reason.”

“I want to be famous and rich,” said Emily coolly.

“Everybody does. Is that all?”

“No. I just _love_ to write.”

“A better reason--but not enough--not enough. Tell me this--if you knew
you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you’d
never have a line published--would you still go on writing--_would_
you?”

“Of course I would,” said Emily disdainfully. “Why, I _have_ to
write--I can’t help it by times--I’ve just _got_ to.”

“Oh--then I’d waste my breath giving advice at all. If it’s _in_ you
to climb you must--there are those who _must_ lift their eyes to the
hills--they can’t breathe properly in the valleys. God help them if
there’s some weakness in them that prevents their climbing. You don’t
understand a word I’m saying--yet. But go on--climb! There, take
your book and go home. Thirty years from now I will have a claim to
distinction in the fact that Emily Byrd Starr was once a pupil of mine.
Go--go--before I remember what a disrespectful baggage you are to write
such stuff about me and be properly enraged.”

Emily went, still a bit scared but oddly exultant behind her fright.
She was so happy that her happiness seemed to irradiate the world with
its own splendour. All the sweet sounds of nature around her seemed
like the broken words of her own delight. Mr. Carpenter watched her out
of sight from the old worn threshold.

“Wind--and flame--and sea!” he muttered. “Nature is always taking us
by surprise. This child has--what I have never had and would have made
any sacrifice to have. But ‘the gods don’t allow us to be in their
debt’--she will pay for it--she will pay.”

At sunset Emily sat in the lookout room. It was flooded with soft
splendour. Outside, in sky and trees, were delicate tintings and
aerial sounds. Down in the garden Daffy was chasing dead leaves along
the red walks. The sight of his sleek, striped sides, the grace of
his movements, gave her pleasure--as did the beautiful, even, glossy
furrows of the ploughed fields beyond the lane, and the first faint
white star in the crystal-green sky.

The wind of the autumn night was blowing trumpets of fairyland on the
hills; and over in Lofty John’s bush was laughter--like the laughter of
fauns. Ilse and Perry and Teddy were waiting there for her--they had
made a tryst for a twilight romp. She would go to them--presently--not
yet. She was so full of rapture that she must write it out before she
went back from her world of dreams to the world of reality. Once she
would have poured it into a letter to her father. She could no longer
do that. But on the table before her lay a brand-new Jimmy-book. She
pulled it towards her, took up her pen, and on its first virgin page
she wrote.

                                  NEW MOON,
                                    BLAIR WATER,
                                       P. E. ISLAND.
                                   October 8th.

I am going to write a diary, that it may be published when I die.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note:

Attempts have been made to standardise punctuation according to the
style used in the original book. Contractions without apostrophes
have been retained as published. Spelling and hyphenation also have
been retained as printed in the original publication except as follows:

  Page 58
    going to open the window, Aunt Elizaeth _changed to_
    going to open the window, Aunt Elizabeth

  Page 68
    is one of the places were dreams grow _changed to_
    is one of the places where dreams grow

  Page 94
    with this unseenly display of _changed to_
    with this unseemly display of

  Page 117
    ike a huge grey cat basking _changed to_
    like a huge grey cat basking

  Page 145
    as Cousin Jimmie said _changed to_
    as Cousin Jimmy said

  Page 147
    She helped Cousin Jimmie fill it _changed to_
    She helped Cousin Jimmy fill it

  Page 154
    Cousin Jimmie added that Tom _changed to_
    Cousin Jimmy added that Tom

  Page 249
    have run away with him myseif _changed to_
    have run away with him myself

    bad-tempered at the Priests _changed to_
    bad-tempered as the Priests

  Page 270
    to the contrary nothwithstanding _changed to_
    to the contrary notwithstanding

End of Project Gutenberg's Emily of New Moon, by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery