She wrapped Teddy’s sketch up in the cardboard and then sat down and wrote a letter.
“Dear Great-Aunt Nancy:
“Aunt Elizabeth had my picture taken to send you but I don’t like it because it makes me look too ugly and I am putting another picture in instead. An artist friend made it for me. It is just like me when I’m smiling and have a bang. I am only lending it to you, not giving it, because I valew it very highly.
Emily put her letter in with the picture—thereby unconsciously cheating the post-office—and slipped out of the house to mail it. Once it was safely in the post-office she drew a breath of relief. She found the walk home very enjoyable. It was a bland day in early April and spring was looking at you round the corners. The Wind Woman was laughing and whistling over the wet sweet fields; freebooting crows held conferences in the tree tops; little pools of sunshine lay in the mossy hollows; the sea was a blaze of sapphire beyond the golden dunes; the maples in Lofty John’s bush were talking about red buds. Everything Emily had ever read of dream and myth and legend seemed a part of the charm of that bush. She was filled to her fingertips with a rapture of living.
“Oh, I smell spring!” she cried as she danced along the brook path.
Then she began to compose a poem on it. Everybody who has ever lived in the world and could string two rhymes together has written a poem on spring. It is the most be-rhymed subject in the world—and always will be, because it is poetry incarnate itself. You can never be a real poet if you haven’t made at least one poem about spring.
Emily was wondering whether she would have elves dancing on the brookside by moonlight, or pixies sleeping in a bed of ferns in her poem, when something confronted her at a bend in the path which was neither elf nor pixy, but seemed odd and weird enough to belong to some of the tribes of Little People. Was it a witch? Or an elderly fay of evil intentions—the bad fairy of all christening tales?
“I’m the b’y’s Aunt Tom,” said the appearance, seeing that Emily was too amazed to do anything but stand and stare.
“Oh!” Emily gasped in relief. She was no longer frightened. But what a very peculiar looking lady Perry’s Aunt Tom was. Old—so old that it seemed quite impossible that she could ever have been young; a bright red hood over crone-like, fluttering grey locks; a little face seamed by a thousand fine, crisscross wrinkles; a long nose with a knob on the end of it; little twinkling, eager, grey eyes under bristly brows; a ragged man’s coat covering her from neck to feet; a basket in one hand and a black knobby stick in the other.
“Staring wasn’t thought good breeding in my time,” said Aunt Tom.
“Oh!” said Emily again. “Excuse me—How do you do!” she added, with a vague grasp after her manners.
“Polite—and not too proud,” said Aunt Tom, peering curiously at her. “I’ve been up to the big house with a pair of socks for the b’y but ’twas yourself I wanted to see.”
“Me?” said Emily blankly.
“Yis. The b’y has been talking a bit of you and a plan kem into my head. Thinks I to myself it’s no bad notion. But I’ll make sure before I waste my bit o’ money. Emily Byrd Starr is your name and Murray is your nature. If I give the b’y an eddication will ye marry him when ye grow up?”
“Me!” said Emily again. It seemed to be all she could say. Was she dreaming? She must be.
“Yis—you. You’re half Murray and it’ll be a great step up f’r the b’y. He’s smart and he’ll be a rich man some day and boss the country. But divil a cent will I spend on him unless you promise.”
“Aunt Elizabeth wouldn’t let me,” cried Emily, too frightened of this odd old body to refuse on her own account.
“If you’ve got any Murray in you you’ll do your own choosing,” said Aunt Tom, thrusting her face so close to Emily’s that her bushy eyebrows tickled Emily’s nose. “Say you’ll marry the b’y and to college he goes.”
Emily seemed to be rendered speechless. She could think of nothing to say—oh, if she could only wake up! She could not even run.
“Say it!” insisted Aunt Tom, thumping her stick sharply on a stone in the path.
Emily was so horrified that she might have said something—anything—to escape. But at this moment Perry bounded out of the spruce copse, his face white with rage, and seized his Aunt Tom most disrespectfully by the shoulder.
“You go home!” he said furiously.
“Now, b’y dear,” quavered Aunt Tom deprecatingly. “I was only trying to do you a good turn. I was asking her to marry ye after a bit an—”
“I’ll do my own asking!” Perry was angrier than ever. “You’ve likely spoiled everything. Go home—go home, I say!”
Aunt Tom hobbled off muttering, “Then I’ll know better than to waste me bit o’ money. No Murray, no money, me b’y.”
When she had disappeared down the brook path Perry turned to Emily. From white he had gone very red.
“Don’t mind her—she’s cracked,” he said. “Of course, when I grow up I mean to ask you to marry me but—”
“I couldn’t—Aunt Elizabeth—”
“Oh, she will then. I’m going to be premier of Canada some day.”
“But I wouldn’t want—I’m sure I wouldn’t—”
“You will when you grow up. Ilse is better looking of course, and I don’t know why I like you best but I do.”
“Don’t you ever talk to me like this again!” commanded Emily, beginning to recover her dignity.
“Oh, I won’t—not till we
