Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/190

 squatted on a stone in a fence corner and waited with ostentatious patience. She knew that when a certain look appeared on Emily’s face she was not to be dragged away until she was ready to go. The sun had vanished and the rain was beginning to fall again when Emily put her Jimmy-book back into her bag, with a sigh of satisfaction.

“I to get it, Ilse.”

“Couldn’t you have waited till you got to dry land and wrote it down from memory?” grumbled Ilse, uncoiling herself from her stone.

“No—I’d have missed some of the flavour then. I’ve got it all now—and in just exactly the right words. Come on—I’ll race you to the house. Oh, smell that wind—there’s nothing in all the world like a salt sea-wind—a savage salt sea-wind. After all, there’s something delightful in a storm. There’s always —deep down in me—that seems to rise and leap out to meet a storm—wrestle with it.”

“I feel that way sometimes—but not tonight,” said Ilse. “I’m tired—and that poor baby”

“Oh!” Emily’s triumph and exultation went from her in a cry of pain. “Oh—Ilse—I’d forgotten for a moment—how could I? can he be?”

“Dead,” said Ilse harshly. “It’s better to think so—than to think of him alive still—out tonight. Come, we've got to get in somewhere. The storm is on for good now—no more showers.”

An angular woman panoplied in a white apron so stiffly starched that it could easily have stood alone, opened the door of the house on the hill and bade them enter.

“Oh, yes, you can stay here, I reckon,” she said, not inhospitably, “if you’ll excuse things being a bit upset. They’re in sad trouble here.”

“Oh—I’m sorry,” stammered Emily. ‘We won’t intrude—we'll go somewhere else.”

“Oh, we don’t mind, if you don’t mind. There’s a spare room. You're welcome. You can’t go on in a