Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/151

 Cousin Jimmy gave a final wag to his head and pushed the crock across the table.

“Have a doughnut, pussy.”

Emily hesitated. She was very fond of doughnuts—and it had been a long time since she had her supper. But doughnuts seemed out of keeping with rebellion and tumult. They were decidedly reactionary in their tendencies. Some vague glimmering of this made Emily refuse the doughnut.

Cousin Jimmy took one himself.

“So you’re not going back to Shrewsbury?”

“Not to Aunt Ruth’s,” said Emily.

“It’s the same thing,” said Cousin Jimmy.

Emily knew it was. She knew it was of no use to hope that Aunt Elizabeth would let her board elsewhere.

“And you walked all the way home over those roads.” Cousin Jimmy shook his head. “Well, you spunk. Heaps of it,” he added meditatively between bites.

“Do you blame me?” demanded Emily passionately—all the more passionately because she felt some inward support had been shaken away by Cousin Jimmy’s head.

“No-o-o, it was a durn mean shame to lock you out—just like Ruth Dutton.”

“And you see—don’t you—that I can’t go back after such an insult?”

Cousin Jimmy nibbled at the doughnut cautiously, as if bent on trying to see how near he could nibble to the hole without actually breaking through.

“I don’t think any of your grandmothers would have given up a chance for an education so easily,” he said. “Not on the Murray side, anyhow,” he added after a moment’s reflection, which apparently reminded him that he knew too little about the Starrs to dogmatise concerning them.

Emily sat very still. As Teddy would have said in cricket parlance, Cousin Jimmy had got her middle wicket with the first ball. She felt at once that when Cousin Jimmy, in that diabolical fit of inspiration, dragged her