“She can’t go through life in cotton wool. Might as well learn spades are spades now as ever. I would have thought she’d have heard it all long ago if Blair Water gossip is what it used to be. If she goes home and tells this I’ll have the indignant virgins of New Moon coming down on me in holy horror as a corrupter of youth. Caroline, don’t you ask me to tell you any more family horrors before my niece, you scandalous old woman. At your age! I’m surprised at you!”
Aunt Nancy and Caroline returned to their knitting and their spicy reminiscences, and upstairs in the Pink Room Emily lay face downwards on her bed and cried for hours. It was so horrible—Ilse’s mother had run away and left her little baby. To Emily that was the awful thing—the strange, cruel, heartless thing that Ilse’s mother had done. She could not bring herself to believe it—there was some mistake somewhere—there was.
“Perhaps she was kidnapped,” said Emily, trying desperately to explain it. “She just went on board to look around—and he weighed anchor and carried her off. She couldn’t have gone away of her own accord and left her dear little baby.”
The story haunted Emily in good earnest. She could think of nothing else for days. It took possession of her and worried and gnawed at her with an almost physical pain. She dreaded going back to New Moon and meeting Ilse with this consciousness of a dark secret which she must hide from her. Ilse knew nothing. She had asked Ilse once where her mother was buried and Ilse had said, “Oh, I don’t know. At Shrewsbury, I guess—that’s where all the Mitchells are buried.”
Emily wrung her slim hands together. She was as sensitive to ugliness and pain as she was to beauty and pleasure, and this thing was both hideous and agonizing. Yet she could not keep from thinking about it, day and night. Life at Wyther Grange suddenly went stale. Aunt Nancy and Caroline all at once gave up talking
