Emily felt an odd sensation of rebellion. She didn’t fancy the idea of her life belonging to anybody but herself—not even to anybody she liked as much as she liked Dean Priest. Dean, watching her, saw it and smiled his whimsical smile that always seemed to have so much more in it than mere smiling.
“That doesn’t quite suit you? Ah, you see one pays a penalty when one reaches out for something beyond the ordinary. One pays for it in bondage of some kind or other. Take your wonderful aster home and keep it as long as you can. It has cost you your freedom.”
He was laughing—he was only joking, of course—yet Emily felt as if a cobweb fetter had been flung round her. Yielding to a sudden impulse she flung the big aster on the ground and set her foot on it.
Dean Priest looked on amusedly. His strange eyes were very kindly as he met hers.
“You rare thing—you vivid thing—you starry thing! We are going to be good friends—we are good friends. I’m coming up to Wyther Grange to-morrow to see those descriptions you’ve written of Caroline and my venerable Aunt in your Jimmy-book. I feel sure they’re delicious. Here’s your path—don’t go roaming again so far from civilization. Good-night, my Star of the Morning.”
He stood at the crossroad and watched her out of sight.
“What a child!” he muttered. “I’ll never forget her eyes as she lay there on the edge of death—the dauntless little soul—and I’ve never seen a creature who seemed so full of sheer joy in existence. She is Douglas Starr’s child—he never called me Jarback.”
He stooped and picked up the broken aster. Emily’s heel had met it squarely and it was badly crushed. But he put it away that night between the leaves of an old volume of Jane Eyre, where he had marked a verse—
All glorious rose upon my sight
That child of shower and gleam.