She grew hot and cold by turns, sank to the floor, buried her face in the heap of cloth and lace and silk. If the good people of Stoughton had peeped at her they would have thought her possessed of an evil spirit. She gnashed her teeth and tore at the garments, her slight frame shaking with sobs of impotent rage and despair.
When she came to herself and went downstairs, pale and calm and cold, her mother was talking with a woman who had come in to gossip. She took up a book and was gone.
“Your daughter is not looking well,” said Mrs. Alcott, sourly resentful of Emily’s courteous frigidity.
“Poor child!” said Mrs. Bromfield, “she takes her father’s death so to heart.”
CHAPTER III.
SAIL—HO!
WINTER’S swoop upon Stoughton that year was early and savage. In her desperate loneliness and boredom Emily began occasionally to indulge in the main distraction of Stoughton—church. On a Sunday late in March she went for the first time since Christmas. Her mother had succumbed to the drugs and had been really ill, so ill that Emily did not dare let herself admit the dread of desolation which menaced. But, the crisis past, Mrs. Bromfield had rapidly returned to her normal state. The peril of death cowed or dignified her into silence. When she again took up her complainings, her daughter was reassured.
As she walked the half mile to the little church, Emily was in better spirits than at any time since she had come to Stoughton. The reaction from her fears had given her natural spirits of youth their first chance to assert themselves. She found herself hopeful for no reason, cheerful not because of benefits received or expected, but because of calamities averted. “I might be so much worse off,” she was thinking. “There is mother, and there is the income. I feel almost rich—and a little ungrateful. I’m in quite a church-going mood.”
The walk through the cold air did her good, and as she went up the aisle her usually pale face was delicately flushed and she was carrying her slender but very womanly figure with that erectness and elasticity which made its charm in the days when people were in the habit of discussing her prospects as based upon her title to beauty. Her black dress and small black hat brought out the finest effects of her red-brown hair and violet eyes and rosy white skin. She was, above all, most distinguished looking—in strong contrast to the stupid faces and ill-carried forms in “Sunday best.”
Her coming caused a stir—that rustling and creaking of garments feminine and starched, which in the small town church always arouses the dozers for something uncommon. She faintly smiled a greeting to Mrs. Cockburn as she entered the pew where that old lady was sitting. She had just raised her head from the appearance of prayer, when Mrs. Cockburn whispered:
“Have you seen young Mr. Wayland?”