Emily and Cousin Jimmy had so much to talk of that the drive home seemed very short.
New Moon was white in the evening sunshine which also lay with exceeding mellowness on the grey old barns. The Three Princesses, shooting up against the silvery sky, were as remote and princessly as ever. The old gulf was singing away down over the fields.
Aunt Laura came running out to meet them, her lovely blue eyes shining with pleasure. Aunt Elizabeth was in the cook-house preparing supper and only shook hands with Emily, but looked a trifle less grim and stately than usual, and she had made Emily’s favourite cream-puffs for supper. Perry was hanging about, barefooted and sunburned, to tell her all the gossip of kittens and calves and little pigs and the new foal. Ilse came swooping over, and Emily discovered she had forgotten how vivid Ilse was—how brilliant her amber eyes, how golden her mane of spun-silk hair, looking more golden than ever under the bright blue silk tam Mrs. Simms had bought her in Shrewsbury. As an article of dress, that loud tam made Laura Murray’s eyes and sensibilities ache, but its colour certainly did set off Ilse’s wonderful hair. She engulfed Emily in a rapturous embrace and quarrelled bitterly with her ten minutes later over the fact that Emily refused to give her Saucy Sal’s sole surviving kitten.
“I ought to have it, you doddering hyena,” stormed Ilse. “It’s as much mine as yours, pig! Our old barn cat is its father.”
“Such talk is not decent,” said Aunt Elizabeth, pale with horror. “And if you two children are going to quarrel over that kitten I’ll have it drowned—remember that.”
Ilse was finally appeased by Emily’s offering to let her name the kitten and have a half interest in it. Ilse named it Daffodil. Emily did not think this suitable, since, from the fact of Cousin Jimmy referring to it as
