through the lawn to the pond, with fishing-hooks and a can of fat, abominable worms—the latter manipulated solely by Ilse—and ordered them to betake themselves up to the Tansy Patch and play with Teddy Kent.
“He’s lonesome and moping. Go and cheer him up,” said the doctor.
Ilse was rather loth to go. She liked Teddy, but it seemed she did not like his mother. Emily was secretly not averse. She had seen Teddy Kent but once, at Sunday School the day before he was taken seriously ill, and she had liked his looks. It had seemed that he liked hers, too, for she caught him staring shyly at her over the intervening pews several times. He was very handsome, Emily decided. She liked his thick, dark-brown hair and his black-browed blue eyes, and for the first time it occurred to her that it might be rather nice to have a boy playmate, too. Not a “beau” of course. Emily hated the school jargon that called a boy your “beau” if he happened to give you a pencil or an apple and picked you out frequently for his partner in the games.
“Teddy’s nice but his mother is queer,” Ilse told her on their way to the Tansy Patch. “She never goes out anywhere—not even to church—but I guess it’s because of the scar on her face. They’re not Blair Water people—they’ve only been living at the Tansy Patch since last fall. They’re poor and proud and not many people visit them. But Teddy is awfully nice, so if his mother gives us some black looks we needn’t mind.”
Mrs. Kent gave them no black looks, though her reception was rather distant. Perhaps she, too, had received some orders from the doctor. She was a tiny creature, with enormous masses of dull, soft, silky, fawn hair, dark, mournful eyes, and a broad scar running slantwise across her pale face. Without the scar she must have been pretty, and she had a voice as soft and uncertain as the wind in the tansy. Emily, with her
