Presently she said again,

“I wish I could have been a child always. You are good then. You are never selfish; you like every one to have everything; but when you are grown up there are some things you like to have all to yourself, you don’t like any one else to have any of them.”

“Yes,” said Waldo sleepily, and she did not speak again.

When they reached the farm-house all was dark, for Lyndall retired as soon as they got home.

Waldo lifted Em from her saddle, and for a moment she leaned her head on his shoulder and clung to him.

“You are very tired,” he said, as he walked with her to the door; “let me go in and light a candle for you.”

“No, thank you; it is all right,” she said. “Good night, Waldo dear.”

But when she went in she sat long alone in the dark.

CHAPTER VII

WALDO GOES OUT TO TASTE LIFE, AND EM STAYS AT HOME AND TASTES IT

AT nine o’clock in the evening, packing his bundles for the next morning’s start, Waldo looked up, and was surprised to see Em’s yellow head peeping in at his door. It was many a month since she had been there. She said she had made him sandwiches for his journey, and she stayed awhile to help him put his goods into the saddlebags.”

“You can leave the old things lying about,” she said; “I will lock the room, and keep it waiting for you to come back some day.”

To come back some day! Would the bird ever return to its cage? But he thanked her. When she went away he stood on the doorstep holding the candle till she had almost reached the house. But Em was that evening in no hurry to enter, and, instead of going in at the back door, walked with lagging footsteps round the low brick wall that ran before the house. Opposite the open window of the parlor she stopped. The little room, kept carefully closed in Tant’ Sannie’s time, was well lighted by a paraffin lamp; books and work lay strewn about it, and it wore a bright, habitable aspect. Beside the lamp at the table in the corner sat Lyndall, the open letters and papers of the day’s post lying scattered before her, while she perused the columns of a newspaper. At the centre table, with his arms folded on an open paper, which there was not light enough to read, sat Gregory. He was looking at her. The light from the open window fell on Em’s little face under its white “kapje” as she looked in, but no one glanced that way.

“Go and fetch me a glass of water,” Lyndall said at last.

Gregory went out to find it; when he put it down at her side she merely moved her head in recognition, and he went back to his seat and his old occupation. Then Em moved slowly away from the window, and through it came in spotted, hard-winged insects, to play round the lamp, till, one by one, they stuck to its glass, and fell to the foot dead.