I’m coming up to Wyther Grange to-morrow to see those descriptions you’ve written of Caroline and my venerable Aunt in your Jimmy-book. I feel sure they’re delicious. Here’s your path—don’t go roaming again so far from civilization. Good-night, my Star of the Morning.”
He stood at the crossroad and watched her out of sight.
“What a child!” he muttered. “I’ll never forget her eyes as she lay there on the edge of death—the dauntless little soul—and I’ve never seen a creature who seemed so full of sheer joy in existence. She is Douglas Starr’s child—he never called me Jarback.”
He stooped and picked up the broken aster. Emily’s heel had met it squarely and it was badly crushed. But he put it away that night between the leaves of an old volume of Jane Eyre, where he had marked a verse—
All glorious rose upon my sight
That child of shower and gleam.
In Dean Priest Emily found, for the first time since her father had died, a companion who could fully sympathize. She was always at her best with him, with a delightful feeling of being understood. To love is easy and therefore common—but to understand—how rare it is! They roamed wonderlands of fancy together in the magic August days that followed upon Emily’s adventure on the bay shore, talked together of exquisite, immortal things, and were at home with “nature’s old felicities” of which Wordsworth so happily speaks.
Emily showed him all the poetry and “descriptions” in her “Jimmy-book” and he read them gravely, and, exactly
