Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/111

 it? Emily, in the delightful throes of literary composition, was lost to all worldly things.

When she had covered the backs of four letter-bills she could see to write no more. But she had emptied out her soul and it was once more free from evil passions. She even felt curiously indifferent to Miss Brownell. Emily folded up her letter-bills and wrote clearly across the packet,

Then she stepped softly across to an old, worn-out sofa in a far corner and knelt down, stowing away her letter and her “letter-bills” snugly on a little shelf formed by a board nailed across it underneath. Emily had discovered this one day when playing in the garret and had noted it as a lovely hiding-place for secret documents. Nobody would ever come across them there. She had writing paper enough to last for months—there must be hundreds of those jolly old letter-bills.

“Oh,” cried Emily, dancing down the garret stairs, “I feel as if I was made out of star-dust.”

Thereafter few evenings passed on which Emily did not steal up to the garret and write a letter, long or short, to her father. The bitterness died out of her grief. Writing to him seemed to bring him so near; and she told him everything, with a certain honesty of confession that was characteristic of her—her triumphs, her failures, her joys, her sorrows, everything went down on the letter-bills of a Government which had not been so economical of paper as it afterwards became. There was fully half a yard of paper in each bill and Emily wrote a small hand and made the most of every inch.

“I like New Moon. It’s so and  here,” she told her father. “And it seems as if we must be very aristokratik when we have a sun dyal. I can’t help