Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/306

 draught from the door. One burned with a steady upright flame like a faithful soul.

“I—don’t know—Aunt Laura,” she answered slowly. “You can be—friends—with candles. I believe I like the candles best after all.”

Aunt Elizabeth, coming in from the cook-house, heard her. Something like pleasure gleamed in her gulf-blue eyes.

“You have some sense in you,” she said.

“That’s the second compliment she has paid me,” thought Emily.

“I think Emily has grown taller since she went to Wyther Grange,” Aunt Laura said, looking at her rather wistfully.

Aunt Elizabeth, snuffing the candles, glanced sharply over her glasses.

“I can’t see it,” she said. “Her dress is just the same length on her.”

“I’m sure she has,” persisted Laura.

Cousin Jimmy, to settle the dispute, measured Emily by the sitting-room door. She just touched the former mark.

“You see,” said Aunt Elizabeth triumphantly, liking to be right even in this small matter.

“She looks—different,” said Laura with a sigh.

Laura, after all, was right. Emily grown, taller and older, in soul, if not in body. It was this change which Laura felt, as close and tender affection swiftly feels. The Emily who returned from Wyther Grange was not the Emily who had gone there. She was no longer wholly the child. Aunt Nancy’s family histories over which she had pondered, her enduring anguish over the story of Ilse’s mother, that terrible hour when she had lain cheek by jowl with death on the cliffs of the bay shore, her association with Dean Priest, all had combined to mature her intelligence and her emotions. When she went to the garret next morning and pulled out her