Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/137

 so relentlessly between them, and release the pent-up flood of old affection.

One of the keenest stings in the situation was that. Evelyn Blake was quite well aware of the state of affairs between Ilse and Emily. The mockery of her long brown eyes and the hidden sneer in her casual sentences betrayed her knowledge and her enjoyment of it. This was gall and wormwood to Emily, who felt that she had no defence against it. Evelyn was a girl whom intimacies between other girls annoyed, and the friendship between. Ilse and Emily had annoyed her especially. It had been so complete—so absorbing. There had been no place in it for any one else. And Evelyn did not like to feel that she was barred out—that there was some garden enclosed, into which she might not enter. She was therefore hugely delighted to think that this vexingly beautiful friendship between two girls she secretly hated was at an end.

 

MILY came downstairs laggingly, feeling that all the colour and music had somehow gone out of life, and that it stretched before her in unbroken greyness. Ten minutes later she was encompassed by rainbows and the desert of her future had blossomed like the rose.

The cause of this miracle of transformation was a thin letter which Aunt Ruth handed to her with an Aunt Ruthian sniff. There was a magazine, too, but Emily did not at first regard it. She saw the address of a floral firm on the corner of the envelope, and sensed at touch the promising thinness of it—so different from the plump letters full of rejected verses.

Her heart beat violently as she tore it open and glanced over the typewritten sheet. 