Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/74

 she had sacrificed comfort and inclination to do her unwelcome duty this ungrateful and unsatisfactory child was not contented.

“I asked you what you were crying for, Emily?” she repeated.

“I’m—homesick, I guess,” sobbed Emily.

Aunt Elizabeth was annoyed.

“A nice home you had to be homesick for,” she said sharply.

“It—it wasn’t as elegant—as New Moon,” sobbed Emily, “but— was there. I guess I’m Father-sick, Aunt Elizabeth. Didn’t you feel awfully lonely when father died?”

Elizabeth Murray involuntarily remembered the ashamed, smothered feeling of relief when old Archibald Murray had died—the handsome, intolerant, autocratic old man who had ruled his family with a rod of iron all his life and had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petulant tyranny of the five years of invalidism that had closed his career. The surviving Murrays had behaved impeccably, and wept decorously, and printed a long and flattering obituary. But had one genuine feeling of regret followed Archibald Murray to his tomb? Elizabeth did not like the memory and was angry with Emily for evoking it.

“I was resigned to the will of Providence,” she said coldly. “Emily, you must understand right now that you are to be grateful and obedient and show your appreciation of what is being done for you. I won’t have tears and repining. What would you have done if you had no friends to take you in? Answer me that.”

“I suppose I would have starved to death,” admitted Emily—instantly beholding a dramatic vision of herself lying dead, looking exactly like the pictures she had seen in one of Ellen Greene’s missionary magazines depicting the victims of an Indian famine.

“Not exactly—but you would have been sent to some