Harbor. Ilse had fashioned delightful fairy wings from tissue paper and tinsel, and Perry had made an ass’s head for Bottom out of an old calf-skin that was very realistic. Emily had toiled happily for many weeks copying out the different parts and adapting them to circumstances. 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. Aunt Elizabeth knew nothing of it all; she would promptly have put a stop to the whole thing, for she thought play-acting exceedingly wicked; but Aunt Laura was privy to the plot, and Cousin Jimmy and Lofty John had already attended a moonlight rehearsal.
To go away and leave all this, even for a time, would be a hard wrench, but on the other hand Emily had a burning curiosity to see Great-Aunt Nancy and Wyther Grange, her quaint, old house at Priest Pond with the famous stone dogs on the gateposts. On the whole, she thought she would like to go; and when she saw Aunt Laura doing up her starched white petticoats and Aunt Elizabeth grimly dusting off a small, black, nail-studded trunk in the garret she knew, before she was told, that the visit to Priest Pond was going to come off; so she took out the letter she had written to Aunt Nancy and added an apologetic postscript.
Ilse chose to be disgruntled because Emily was going for a visit. In reality Ilse felt appalled at the lonely prospect of a month or more without her inseparable chum. No more jolly evenings of play-acting in Lofty John’s bush, no more pungent quarrels. Besides, Ilse herself had never been anywhere for a visit in her whole life and she felt sore over this fact.
