the fir-scented dusk, with Tweed walking between them, his nose touching his master’s hand softly every now and then, while the robins in the trees above them whistled blithely in the afterlight.
With nine out of ten people Emily was secretive and reserved, but Dean Priest was sealed of her tribe and she divined it instantly. He had a right to the inner sanctuary and she yielded it unquestioningly. She talked to him freely.
Besides, she felt alive again—she felt the wonderful thrill of living again, after that dreadful space when she had seemed to hang between life and death. She felt, as she wrote to her father afterwards, “as if a little bird was singing in my heart.” And oh, how good the green sod felt under her feet!
She told him all about herself and her doings and beings. Only one thing she did not tell him—her worry over Ilse’s mother. That she could not speak of to any one. Aunt Nancy need not have been frightened that she would carry tales to New Moon.
“I wrote a whole poem yesterday when it rained and I couldn’t get out,” she said. “It began,
I sit by the western window
That looks on Malvern Bay—”
“Am I not to hear the whole of it?” asked Dean, who knew perfectly well that Emily was hoping that he would ask it.
Emily delightedly repeated the whole poem. When she came to the two lines she liked best in it,
Perhaps in those wooded islands
That gem the proud bay’s breast—
she looked up sidewise at him to see if he admired them. But he was walking with eyes cast down and an absent expression on his face. She felt a little disappointed.
