Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/129

 when she saw it, and then cowered down in her corner aghast at the sound she had made in the great, silent, echoing room. She wished that something jump out of the bed and put an end to her.

“I wonder what Aunt Elizabeth would feel like if I was found here ,” she thought, vindictively.

In spite of her fright she began to dramatize it and felt Aunt Elizabeth’s remorse so keenly that she decided only to be unconscious and come back to life when everybody was sufficiently scared and penitent. But people died in this room—dozens of them. According to Cousin Jimmy it was a New Moon tradition that when any member of the family was near death he or she was promptly removed to the spare-room, to die amid surroundings of proper grandeur. Emily could them dying, in that terrible bed. She felt that she was going to scream again, but she fought the impulse down. A Starr must not be a coward. Oh, that owl! Suppose, when she looked away from it and then looked back she would find that it had silently hopped down from the wardrobe and was coming towards her. Emily dared not look at it for fear that was just what had happened. the bed curtains stir and waver! She felt beads of cold perspiration on her forehead.

Then something did happen. A beam of sunlight struck through a small break in one of the slats of the blind and fell directly athwart the picture of Grandfather Murray hanging over the mantel-piece. It was a crayon “enlargement” copied from the old daguerreotype in the parlour below. In that gleam of light his face seemed veritably to leap out of the gloom at Emily with its grim frown strangely exaggerated. Emily’s nerve gave way completely. In an ungovernable spasm of panic she rushed madly across the room to the window, dashed the curtains aside, and caught up the slat blind. A blessed flood of sunshine burst in. Outside was a wholesome, friendly, human world. And, of all wonders, there,