“You cast your loveliness around
Where’er you chance to be,
And you shall always, buttercup,
Be a flower dear to me.”
Emily felt very proud. This was her third poem and undoubtedly her best. Nobody could say it was very blank. She must hurry up to the garret and write it on a letter-bill. But Aunt Elizabeth was confronting her on the steps.
“Emily, where are your boots and stockings?”
Emily came back from cloudland with a disagreeable jolt. She had forgotten all about boots and stockings.
“In the hole by the gate,” she said flatly.
“You went to the store barefooted?”
“Yes.”
“After I had told you not to?”
This seemed to Emily a superfluous question and she did not answer it. But Aunt Elizabeth’s turn had come.
Emily was locked in the spare-room and told that she must stay there until bedtime. She had pleaded against such a punishment in vain. She had tried to give the Murray look but it seemed that—in her case at any rate—it did not come at will.
“Oh, don’t shut me up alone there, Aunt Elizabeth,” she implored. “I know I was naughty—but don’t put me in the spare-room.”
Aunt Elizabeth was inexorable. She knew that it was a cruel thing to shut an over-sensitive child like Emily in that gloomy room. But she thought she was doing
