Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/355

 went for long walks together all over Blair Water, with Tweed woofing around them, and explored places and roads Emily had never seen before. They watched a young moon grow old, night by night; they talked in dim scented chambers of twilight over long red roads of mystery; they followed the lure of hill winds; they saw the stars rise and Dean told her all about them—the great constellations of the old myths. It was a wonderful month; but on the first day of Teddy’s convalescence Emily was off to the Tansy Patch for the afternoon and Jarback Priest walked—if he walked at all—alone.

Aunt Elizabeth was extremely polite to him, though she did not like the Priests of Priest Pond overmuch, and never felt quite comfortable under the mocking gleam of “Jarback’s” green eyes and the faint derision of his smile, which seemed to make Murray pride and Murray traditions seem much less important than they really were.

“He has the Priest flavour,” she told Laura, “though it isn’t as strong in him as in most of them. And he’s certainly helping Emily—she has begun to spunk up since he came.”

Emily continued to “spunk up” and by September, when the measles epidemic was spent and Dean Priest had gone on one of his sudden swoops over to Europe for the autumn, she was ready for school again—a little taller, a little thinner, a little less childlike, with great grey shadowy eyes that had looked into death and read the riddle of a buried thing, and henceforth would hold in them some haunting, elusive remembrance of that world behind the veil. Dean Priest had seen it—Mr. Carpenter saw it when she smiled at him across her desk at school.

“She’s left the childhood of her soul behind, though she is still a child in body,” he muttered.

One afternoon amid the golden days and hazes of