very delightful and satisfying. Ilse had been a splendid chum—there was no doubt about that. After Emily had cooled down she went to the dormer window and cried.
“Wretched, wretched me!” she sobbed, dramatically, but very sincerely.
Yet the bitterness of her break with Rhoda was not present. This quarrel was fair and open and above-board. She had not been stabbed in the back. But of course she and Ilse would never be chums again. You couldn’t be chums with a person who called you a chit and a biped, and a serpent, and told you to go to the devil. The thing was impossible. And besides, Ilse could never forgive her—for Emily was honest enough to admit to herself that she had been very aggravating, too.
Yet, when Emily went to the playhouse next morning, bent on retrieving her share of broken dishes and boards, there was Ilse, skipping around, hard at work, with all the shelves back in place, the moss garden re-made, and a beautiful parlour laid out and connected with the living-room by a spruce arch.
“Hello, you. Here’s your parlour and I hope you’ll be satisfied now,” she said gaily. “What’s kept you so long? I thought you were never coming.”
This rather posed Emily after her tragic night, wherein she had buried her second friendship and wept over its grave. She was not prepared for so speedy a resurrection. As far as Ilse was concerned it seemed as if no quarrel had ever taken place.
“Why, that was yesterday,” she said in amazement, when Emily, rather distantly, referred to it. Yesterday and to-day were two entirely different things in Ilse’s philosophy. Emily accepted it—she found she had to. Ilse, it transpired, could no more help flying into tantrums now and then than she could help being jolly and affectionate between them. What amazed Emily, in whom things were bound to rankle for a time, was the way in
