"Emily of New Moon"

[fiefoe]

I first read L. M. Montgomery in high school, and her spunky, fanciful heroine still charms after all these years.

• the two big spruces in the front yard–Adam-and-Eve, they always called those spruces, because of a whimsical resemblance Emily had traced between their position, with reference to a small apple-tree between them, and that of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge in an old-fashioned picture in one of Ellen Greene's books. The Tree of Knowledge looked exactly like the squat little apple-tree, and Adam and Eve stood up on either side as stiffly and rigidly as did the spruces.
• She loved the spruce barrens, away at the further end of the long, sloping pasture. That was a place where magic was made. She came more fully into her fairy birthright there than in any other place... a queen might have gladly given a crown for her visions–her dreams of wonder.
• And the barrens were such a splendid place in which to play hide and seek with the Wind Woman. She was so very real there; if you could just spring quickly enough around a little cluster of spruces–only you never could–you would see her as well as feel her and hear her. There she was–that was the sweep of her grey cloak–no, she was laughing up in the very top of the taller trees–and the chase was on again.. a lovely, pale, pinky-green lake of sky with a new moon in it... It would hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down. Then she would read it to Father. She must not forget how the tips of the trees on the hill came out like fine black lace across the edge of the pinky-green sky.
• It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside–but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond–only a glimpse–and heard a note of unearthly music... And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty.
• 'I meant to tell you myself to-night. And now the old absurdity of an Ellen has told you–brutally I suppose–and hurt you dreadfully. She has the brain of a hen and the sensibility of a cow. May jackals sit on her grandmother's grave!
• Emily was glad it was raining; many a time she had heard Ellen Greene say that happy was the corpse the rain fell on; and it was easier to see Father go away in that soft, kind, grey mist than through sparkling, laughing sunshine.
• ('I won't–I won't!' exclaimed Emily–at least she thought it with such vim that it almost seemed that she exclaimed it. She forgot that she had wanted to die soon, so that she could overtake Father. She wanted to live now, just to put the Murrays in the wrong.
• ('I don't want them cured!' Emily was getting angrier and angrier all the time under the table. 'I like my faults better than I do your–your–' she fumbled mentally for a word–then triumphantly recalled a phrase of her father's–'your abominable virtues!')
• 'While I was under the table,' she said, 'I made a face at Uncle Wallace and stuck my tongue out at Aunt Eva.' <> She said it sorrowfully, desiring to make a clean breast of her transgressions; but so easily do we misunderstand each other that the Murrays actually thought that she was indulging in a piece of gratuitous impertinence.
• 'Really-truly fairies?' she questioned. <> 'Why, you know, if a fairy was really-truly it wouldn't be a fairy,' said Cousin Jimmy seriously. 'Could it, now?'
• had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petulant tyranny of the five years of invalidism that had closed his career. The surviving Murrays had behaved impeccably, and wept decorously, and printed a long and flattering obituary. But had one genuine feeling of regret followed Archibald Murray to his tomb?
• 'Oh, you're out there, are you, dearest one?' she whispered, stretching out her arms. 'Oh, I'm so glad to hear you. You're such company, Wind Woman. I'm not lonesome any more. And the flash came, too! I was afraid it might never come at New Moon.' <> Her soul suddenly escaped from the bondage of Aunt Elizabeth's stuffy feather-bed and gloomy canopy and sealed windows. She was out in the open with the Wind Woman and the other gipsies of the night–the fireflies, the moths, the brooks, the clouds. Far and wide she wandered in enchanted reverie until she coasted the shore of dreams and fell soundly asleep on the fat, hard pillow,
• She did–and found that it led straight into Fairyland–along the bank of a wide, lovely brook–a wild, dear, little path with lady-ferns beckoning and blowing along it, the shyest of elfin June-bells under the firs, and little whims of loveliness at every curve. She breathed in the tang of fir-balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs, and everywhere the frolic of elfin lights and shadows. Here and there the young maple branches interlaced as if to make a screen for dryad faces–Emily knew all about dryads, thanks to her father–and the great sheets of moss under the trees were meet for Titania's couch.
• they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so scarce in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry.'
• It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow–a garden remembering a hundred vanished summers.
• But beneath the epitaph was no scriptural verse or pious psalm. Clear and distinct, in spite of age and lichen, ran the line, 'Here I stay.' <> 'That's how he got even with her,' said Cousin Jimmy. 'He was a good husband to her–and she was a good wife and bore him a fine family–and he never was the same after her death. But that rankled in him until it had to come out.'
• 'It was one of your mother's aprons when she was a little girl, Emily,' said Aunt Laura comfortingly, and rather sentimentally. <> 'Then,' said Emily, uncomforted and unsentimental, 'I don't wonder she ran away with Father when she grew up.'
• But at that instant she knew she could write poetry. And with this queer unreasonable conviction came–the flash! Right there, surrounded by hostility and suspicion, fighting alone for her standing, without backing or advantage, came the wonderful moment when soul seemed to cast aside the bonds of flesh and spring upward to the stars.
• 'It would take a good deal more than a bang to do that, Emily. We will not have bangs at New Moon–except on the Molly cows. They are the only creatures that should wear bangs.' <> Aunt Elizabeth smiled triumphantly around the table–Aunt Elizabeth did smile sometimes when she thought she had silenced some small person by exquisite ridicule.
• fields creamy with clover, soft dark trees against amber skies, and the madcap music the Wind Woman made in the firs behind the barns when she blew straight up from the gulf; her days became vivid and interesting, full of little pleasures and delights, like tiny, opening, golden buds on the tree of life.
• She had never heard the Bugle Song before–but now she heard it–and saw it–the rose-red splendour falling on those storied, snowy summits and ruined castles–the lights that never were on land or sea streaming over the lakes–she heard the wild echoes flying through the purple valleys and the misty passes–the mere sound of the words seemed to make an exquisite echo in her soul–and when Miss Brownell came to   (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45385/the-princess-the-splendour-falls-on-castle-walls')
• This was the quiet corner of the dormer-window, where shadows always moved about, softly and swingingly, and beautiful mosaics patterned the bare floor. From it one could see over the tree-tops right down to the Blair Water.
• she told her father. 'And it seems as if we must be very aristokratik when we have a sun dyal. I can't help feeling proud of it all. I am afraid I have too much pride and so I ask God every night to take most of it away but not quite all. It is very easy to get a repputation for pride in Blair Water school. If you walk straight and hold your head up you are a proud one.
• I don't know whether it is any use forgiving people or not. Yes, it is, it makes you feel more comfortable yourself.
• I have always suspekted my eyes were beautiful but I was not sure. Now that I know they are I'm afraid I'll always be wondering if people notis it. I have to go to bed at half past eight and I don't like it but I sit up in bed and look out of the window till it gets dark, so I get square with Aunt Elizabeth that way, and I listen to the sound the sea makes. I like it now though it always makes me feel sorrowful, but it's a kind of a nice sorrow.
• It was a rather curious fact that from that day Emily ceased to grieve over her lost friend. The matter had suddenly become of small importance. It was as if it had happened so long ago that nothing, save the mere emotionless memory of it, remained. Emily speedily regained appetite and animation, resumed her letters to her father and found that life tasted good again, marred only by a mysterious prescience that Aunt Elizabeth had it in for her in regard to her defeat in the matter of her hair and would get even sooner or later.
• In spite of her fright she began to dramatize it and felt Aunt Elizabeth's remorse so keenly that she decided only to be unconscious and come back to life when everybody was sufficiently scared and penitent. But people had died in this room–dozens of them. According to Cousin Jimmy it was a New Moon tradition that when any member of the family was near death he or she was promptly removed to the spare-room, to die amid surroundings of proper grandeur.
• 'You needn't suppose, you little puling, snivelling chit, that you are going to boss me, just because you live at New Moon,' shrieked Ilse, as an ultimatum, stamping her foot... 'I'm glad to be rid of you–you proud, stuck-up, conceited, top-lofty biped,' cried Ilse. 'Never you speak to me again.
• 'I'm not going to say things about you,' said Emily deliberately. 'I'm just going to think them.'
  This was far more aggravating than speech and Emily knew it. Ilse was driven quite frantic by it. Who knew what unearthly things Emily might be thinking about her any time she took the notion to? Ilse had already discovered what a fertile imagination Emily had.
  'Do you suppose I care what you think, you insignificant serpent? Why, you haven't any sense.'
• And certainly Rhoda Stuart and Dot Payne compared to Ilse were 'as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine'–or would have been if Emily had as yet known anything more of her Tennyson than the Bugle Song.
• 'Ilse says Teddy ought to like her best because there is more fun in her than in me but that is not true. There is just as much fun in me when my conshence doesn't bother me.
• That is an okward question because often I cant tell what makes me do things. Sometimes I do them just to find out what I feel like doing them. And sometimes I do them because I want to have some exciting things to tell my grandchildren. Is it impropper to talk about haveing grandchildren. I have discovered that it is impropper to talk about haveing children.
• Aunt Laura had a horror of anyone eating apples in the dark lest they might eat an apple worm into the bargain. Emily, therefore, should have been able fully to satisfy her appetite for apples at home; but there is a certain odd kink in human nature by reason of which the flavour of the apples belonging to somebody else is always vastly superior to our own–as the crafty serpent of Eden very well knew.
• I leave you all my share of the broken dishes in our playhouse and please tell Teddy good-bye for me. He will never be able to teach me how to put worms on a fish-hook now. I promised him I would learn because I did not want him to think I was a coward but I am glad I did not for I know what the worm feels like now.
• 'Why, what's the matter with dod-gasted?' said Emily, quite mystified. 'Cousin Jimmy uses it often, when things vex him. He used it to-day–he said that dod-gasted heifer had broken out of the graveyard pasture again.'
• 'Emily,' said Aunt Elizabeth, with the air of one impaling herself on the easiest horn of a dilemma, 'your Cousin Jimmy is a man–and men sometimes use expressions, in the heat of anger, that are not proper for little girls.'...
  'Well, then, I won't use it any more,' said Emily resignedly, 'but Lofty John is dod-gasted.'
• In October Cousin Jimmy began to boil the pigs' potatoes–unromantic name for a most romantic occupation–or so it appeared to Emily, whose love of the beautiful and picturesque was satisfied as it had never yet been on those long, cool, starry twilights of the waning year at New Moon... Sometimes he poked the fire–Emily loved that part of the performance–sending glorious streams of rosy sparks upward into the darkness; sometimes he stirred the potatoes with a long pole, looking, with his queer, forked grey beard and belted 'jumper,' just like some old gnome or troll of northland story mixing the contents of a magical cauldron; and sometimes he sat beside Emily on the grey granite boulder near the pot and recited his poetry for her.
• the sharp air was full of the pleasant tang of the burning spruce cones Cousin Jimmy shovelled under the pot; Emily's furry kitten, Mike II, frisked and scampered about like a small, charming demon of the night; the fire glowed with beautiful redness and allure through the gloom; there were nice whispery sounds everywhere; the 'great big dark' lay spread around them full of mysteries that daylight never revealed; and over all a purple sky powdered with stars.
• a funny, dear little call, like three clear bird notes, the first just medium pitch, the second higher, the third dropping away into lowness and sweetness long-drawn out–like the echoes in the Bugle Song that went clearer and further in their dying. That call always had an odd effect on Emily; it seemed to her that it fairly drew the heart out of her body–and she had to follow it. She thought Teddy could have whistled her clear across the world with those three magic notes.
• a dusty, ambling, red pony of that peculiar gait and appearance pertaining to the ponies of country pedlars–a certain placid, unhasting leanness as of a nag that has encountered troubles of his own and has lived them down by sheer patience and staying power.
• But it was weeks before Emily was really forgiven and she felt uncomfortable enough over it. Aunt Elizabeth could be a not ungenerous conqueror but she was very disagreeable in defeat. It was really just as well that Emily could not summon the Murray look at will.
• But he is a nice boy though his manners are crood. Aunt Laura says they are crood. I don't know what it means but I guess it means he always says what he thinks right out and eats beans with his knife. I like Perry but in a different way from Teddy. Isn't it funny, dear Father, how many kinds of ways of liking there are?
• She spells his name with a Capital G now because it is best to be on the safe side. I think God is just like my flash, only it lasts only a second and He lasts always...  It was not stealing it was just forgetting. But Ilse got mad at the last and said I was a she jakobite (whatever that is) and a thief
• The lines Emily had thought the finest seemed the most ridiculous. The other pupils laughed more than ever and Emily felt that the bitterness of the moment could never go out of her heart. The little fancies that had been so beautiful when they came to her as she wrote were shattered and bruised now, like torn and mangled butterflies–'vistas in some fairy dream,' chanted Miss Brownell,
• As for Teddy Kent, who did not wage war with spit pills but preferred subtler methods of revenge, he was busy drawing something on a sheet of paper. Rhoda found the sheet on her desk the next morning; on it was depicted a small, scrawny monkey, hanging by its tail from a branch; and the face of the monkey was as the face of Rhoda Stuart.
• Now that the crisis had come she found herself able to confront it coolly–nay, more, to take a curious interest in it under all her secret fear and shame, as if some part of her had detached itself from the rest and was interestedly absorbing impressions and analysing motives and describing settings. She felt that when she wrote about this scene later on she must not forget to describe the odd shadows the candle under Aunt Elizabeth's nose cast upward on her face, producing a rather skeletonic effect. As for Miss Brownell, could she ever have been a baby–a dimpled, fat, laughing baby? The thing was unbelievable.
• 'Perry, get back into that loft and get your clothes on this minute!' ordered Cousin Jimmy. <> The bare legs shot up and disappeared. There was a chuckle as mirthful and malicious as an owl's beyond the black hole.
• Never again, Miss Brownell felt, would Emily be able to look levelly at her with those dauntless eyes that bespoke a soul untamable and free, no matter what punishment might be inflicted upon body or mind. The memory of this moment would always be with Emily–she could never forget that she had knelt in abasement.
• 'You will eat your supper alone to-night, Emily, in the pantry–you will have bread and milk only. And you will not speak one word to any one until to-morrow morning.' <> 'But you won't forbid me to think?' said Emily anxiously.
• I looked up ween in it and Miss Brownell was right. I did not know what it really meant. It rymed so well with sheen and I thought it meant to behold or see but it means to think.
• 'I have three cantos of The White Lady finished. I have the heroin imured in a convent and I don't know how to get her out because I am not a Catholic. I suppose it would have been better if I had a Protestant heroin but there were no Protestants in the days of shivalry.
• I have written a descripshun of her on a letter-bill. I like writing about people I don't like better than about those I do like. Aunt Laura is nicer to live with than Aunt Elizabeth, but Aunt Elizabeth is nicer to write about.
• and if she had never eaten the Big Sweet apple Lofty John would not have played a joke on her and if he had not played a joke on her Aunt Elizabeth would never have gone and said bitter, Murray-like things to him; and if Aunt Elizabeth had never said bitter Murray-like things to him Lofty John would not have become offended and revengeful; and if Lofty John had not become offended and revengeful he would never have taken it into his lofty head to cut down the beautiful grove to the north of New Moon. <> For this was exactly where this house-that-jack-built progression had landed them all.
• Teddy felt so worried about it that he added a few more devils to his sketch of Lofty John in purgatory and lengthened the prongs of their pitchforks quite considerably.
• Very likely Father Cassidy would refuse to interfere with Lofty John, who was a good Catholic, while she was, in his opinion, a heretic. But for any chance, even the faintest, of averting the calamity impending over New Moon, Emily would have faced the entire Sacred College.
• And you see ministers and priests can't do their own swearing.  They have to keep cats to do it for them. I never knew any cat that could sware as genteelly and effectively as the B'y.'
• implored Father Cassidy. 'Elves never cry–they can't. It would break my heart to discover you weren't av the Green Folk. You may call yourself av New Moon and av any religion you like, but the fact remains that you belong to the Golden Age and the old gods. That's why I must save your precious bit av greenwood for you.'
• 'Dispensation is a hard word to work into a poem,' said Emily.
  'Undoubtedly. But young ladies who will write epic poems and who will lay the scenes thereof amid times and manners av hundreds av years ago, and will choose heroines of a religion quite unknown to them, must expect to run up against a few snags.'
• 'I haven't a doubt. But two girls who will go to all the trouble av inventing a new language just to get square with some poor little French boys–you're beyond me,' said Father Cassidy, helplessly. 'Goodness knows what you'll be doing when you grow up. You'll be Red Revolutionists. I tremble for Canada.'
• But I'm reading such an interesting book over there. It tells about everything that's inside of you. I've got as far along as the liver and its diseases. The pictures are so interesting. Please let me finish it.' This was worse than novels. Aunt Elizabeth was truly horrified. Things that were inside of you were not to be read about.
• New Moon was noted for its cheeses–and Emily found the whole process absorbing, from the time the rennet was put in the warm new milk till the white curds were packed away in the hoop and put under the press in the old orchard, with the big, round, grey 'cheese' stone to weight it down as it had weighed down New Moon cheeses for a hundred years.
• She had 'cut' the play after a fashion that would have harrowed Shakespeare's soul, but after all the result was quite pretty and coherent. It did not worry them that four small actors had to take six times as many parts. Emily was Titania and Hermia and a job lot of fairies besides, Ilse was Hippolyta and Helena, plus some more fairies, and the boys were anything that the dialogue required.
• * 'I'm not, you blithering centipede,' Ilse yelled after her. 'Putting on airs because your aunt has stone dogs on her gateposts! Why, I know a woman in Shrewsbury who has dogs on her posts that are ten times stonier than your aunt's!'
• Caroline, do you notice what a pretty hand Emily has? As pretty as mine when I was young. And an elbow like a cat's. Cousin Susan Murray had an elbow like that. It's odd–she has more Murray points than Starr points and yet she looks like the Starrs and not like the Murrays. What odd sums in addition we all are–the answer is never what you'd expect.
• You haven't come-hither eyes–it wouldn't be a Murray tradish.' Aunt Nancy laughed. 'The Murrays have keep-your-distance eyes–and so have you–though your lashes contradict them a bit. But sometimes eyes like that–combined with certain other points–are quite as effective as come-hither eyes. Men go by contraries oftener than not–if you tell them to keep off they'll come on.
• At last it got so bad I couldn't stand it. I can bear it when other people have a bad opinion of me but it hurts too much when I have a bad opinion of myself.
• Loves, births, deaths, scandals, tragedies–anything that came into their old heads. Nor did they spare details. Aunt Nancy revelled in details. She forgot nothing, and sins and weaknesses that death had covered and time shown mercy to were ruthlessly dragged out and dissected by this ghoulish old lady.
• But between a fool and a sensible woman did a man ever hesitate? The fool wins every time, Caroline. That's why you never got a husband. You were too sensible. I got mine by pretending to be a fool. Emily, you remember that. You have brains–hide them. Your ankles will do more for you than your brains ever will.'
• 'That doesn't quite suit you? Ah, you see one pays a penalty when one reaches out for something beyond the ordinary. One pays for it in bondage of some kind or other. Take your wonderful aster home and keep it as long as you can. It has cost you your freedom.' <> He was laughing–he was only joking, of course–yet Emily felt as if a cobweb fetter had been flung round her. Yielding to a sudden impulse she flung the big aster on the ground and set her foot on it.
• 'You rare thing–you vivid thing–you starry thing! We are going to be good friends–we are good friends. I'm coming up to Wyther Grange to-morrow to see those descriptions you've written of Caroline and my venerable Aunt in your Jimmy-book.
• She was always at her best with him, with a delightful feeling of being understood. To love is easy and therefore common–but to understand–how rare it is! They roamed wonderlands of fancy together in the magic August days that followed upon Emily's adventure on the bay shore, talked together of exquisite, immortal things, and were at home with 'nature's old felicities' of which Wordsworth so happily speaks.
• When he spoke of Athens as 'the City of the Violet Crown' Emily realized afresh what magic is made when the right words are wedded; and she loved to think of Rome as 'the City of the Seven Hills.'
• 'I'm sure I'll like studying history after this,' said Emily; 'except Canadian History. I'll never like it–it's so dull. Not just at the first, when we belonged to France and there was plenty of fighting, but after that it's nothing but politics.' <> 'The happiest countries, like the happiest women, have no history,' said Dean.... Do you know what makes history? Pain–and shame–and rebellion–and bloodshed and heartache. Star, ask yourself how many hearts ached–and broke–to make those crimson and purple pages in history that you find so enthralling.
• 'Go home, Emily. I'm tired of you. I like you very well–you're not stupid and you're passably pretty and you've behaved exceedingly well–tell Elizabeth you do the Murrays credit–but I'm tired of you. Go home.'
• '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.
• 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.'
• 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.
• 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
• 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 learnt from Aunt Nancy. Very striking, I think.)
• 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.
• 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–schoolteachers knew their place better in my father's time. ..  I am not decrying education. But you are not going to be a slave to the public–no Murray girl ever was that.'
• 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;
• 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.
• '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.'
• 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.
• '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–
  '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–
  September–is there a month you've missed?–'Windy meadows harvest-deep'–good line.
• '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.'
• 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?
• 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.'