Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/216

 have a pretty knack of phrase-turning; but I should be doing you an unkindness if I let you think that such a knack meant a very great deal.’ If this is true—and it very likely is, for Dean is so clever and knows so much—then I can never accomplish anything worth while. I won't to accomplish anything—I  be just a ‘pretty scribbler.’

“But it’s different with Teddy.

“Teddy was wildly elated tonight—and so was I when I heard his news. He showed two of his pictures at the Charlottetown exhibition in September, and Mr. Lewes, of Montreal, has offered him fifty dollars apiece for them. That will pay his board in Shrewsbury for the winter and make it easier for Mrs. Kent. Although wasn’t glad when he told her. She said, ‘Oh, yes, you think you are independent of me now’—and cried. Teddy was hurt, because he had never thought of such a thing. Poor Mrs. Kent. She must be very lonely. There is some strange barrier between her and her kind. I haven’t been to the Tansy Patch for a long, long time. Once in the summer I went with Aunt Laura, who had heard Mrs. Kent was ill. Mrs. Kent was able to be up and she talked to Aunt Laura, but she never spoke to me, only looked at me now and then with a queer, smouldering fire in her eyes. But when we rose to come away, she spoke once—and said,

“‘You are very tall. You will soon be a woman—and stealing some other woman’s son from her.’

“Aunt Laura said, as we walked home, that Mrs. Kent had always been strange, but was growing stranger.

“‘Some people think her mind is affected,’ she said.

“‘I don’t think the trouble is in her mind. She has a sick soul,’ I said.

“‘Emily, dear, that is a dreadful thing to say,’ said Aunt Laura.

“I don’t see why. If bodies and minds can be sick, can’t souls be, too? There are times when I feel as certain as if I had been told it that Mrs. Kent got some kind of terrible soul-wound some time, and it has never healed.