out” as it was called, though it was not really a lookout. But it occupied the place in New Moon, looking over the front door to the garden, that the real lookouts did in other Blair Water houses, so it went by that name. It had been prepared for Emily’s occupancy in her absence and when bedtime came on the first evening of her return Aunt Elizabeth curtly told her that henceforth she was to have her mother’s room.
“All to myself?” exclaimed Emily.
“Yes. We will expect you to take care of it yourself and keep it very tidy.”
“It has never been slept in since the night before your mother—went away,” said Aunt Laura, with a queer sound in her voice—a sound of which Aunt Elizabeth disapproved.
“Your mother,” she said, looking coldly at Emily over the flame of the candle—an attitude that gave a rather gruesome effect to her acquiline features—“ran away—flouted her family and broke her father’s heart. She was a silly, ungrateful, disobedient girl. I hope you will never disgrace your family by such conduct.”
“Oh, Aunt Elizabeth,” said Emily breathlessly, “when you hold the candle down like that it makes your face look just like a corpse! Oh, it’s so interesting.”
Aunt Elizabeth turned and led the way upstairs in grim silence. There was no use in wasting perfectly good admonitions on a child like this.
Left alone in her lookout, lighted dimly by the one small candle, Emily gazed about her with keen and thrilling interest. She could not get into bed until she had explored every bit of it. The room was very old-fashioned, like all the New Moon rooms. The walls were papered with a design of slender gilt diamonds enclosing golden stars and hung with worked woollen mottoes and pictures that had been “supplements” in the girlhood of her aunts. One of them, hanging over the head of the bed, represented two guardian angels. In its day this
