She says Saucy Sal has hadkittens at
last.
The baby was asleep in its crib and the
servant girl was watchingit. They knitted and gossiped on, enjoyingthemselves
hugely. I dont want Aunt Nancy to take the edge off you. People so often felt
that he was laughingAT them instead of WITH them. Whomdo you belong to that you
are let risk your life on these dangerousbanks?
I didnt know any one ever talked as you do
except in books, shetold him.
Yielding to a suddenimpulse she flung the big
aster on the ground and set her foot onit. Aunt Nancy andCaroline returned to
the back parlour and their cribbage.
What about your tumble overthe bank down
there? I like cats with one part of my mind and dogs with another part,she
said.
Take your wonderful aster homeand keep it as
long as you can. She always called him Jarback rather contemptuously,while
Caroline scrupulously called him Dean. Emilys heel had met itsquarely and it
was badly crushed. Everybody knows what kind of aman hes been ever since,
though. It would beHATEFUL to think any one I didnt like had saved my life. She
always called him Jarback rather contemptuously,while Caroline scrupulously
called him Dean. If it had been a Murray airloom Id havetorn up the turf Aunt
Nancy said. Im going to earn heaps ofmoney for myself. If everybody had always
been happythered be nothing to read about. I wrote a whole poem yesterday when
it rained and I couldnt getout, she said.
I toldyou the story of Leonidas and his
Spartans the other day.
It is nice to think He can hear me ifnobody
else can. Sit right there, Tweed, till I come back. But he looked very human
andtrusty watching her with great kindly eyes. Then, characteristically she
thought of a postscript.
Ivetried, she concluded candidly, and I cant
think of ANYTHING tosay. He stood at the cross-road and watched her out of
sight.
She had come so near to making another
terriblehole in her manners. She wasdesperately afraid that Aunt Nancy would
branch off to somethingelse. She lay still and her great, grey-purple eyes
said,Save me.
But your soul is your own,and fire-new, Ill
swear to that. Emily, neveryou be fool enough to marry a man much older than
yourself.
She was always ather best with him, with a
delightful feeling of being understood. When Leo came home from a voyage and
found Beatrice married he tookit coolly enough. But shefelt very badly when she
turned to Dean.
Ah, you see one pays a penalty whenone reaches
out for something beyond the ordinary.
She felt that she was on the verge of
solvingthe mystery that had so long worried and puzzled her.
Then he wound the rope around the trunk of a
heavy fir. I enjoy my own company, said Emily gravely.