When the door had closed behind Mistress McIntyre, the girls got up and dressed rather laggingly. Emily thought of the day before her with some distaste. The fine flavour of adventure and romance with which they had started out had vanished, and canvassing a country road for subscriptions had suddenly become irksome. Physically, they were both tireder than they thought.
“It seems like an age since we left Shrewsbury,” grumbled Ilse as she pulled on her stockings.
Emily had an even stronger feeling of a long passage of time. Her wakeful, enraptured night under the moon had seemed in itself like a year of some strange soul-growth. And this past night had been wakeful also, in a very different way, and she had roused from her brief sleep at its close with an odd, rather unpleasant sensation of some confused and troubled journey—a sensation which old Mistress McIntyre’s story had banished for a time, but which now returned as she brushed her hair.
“I feel as if I had been wandering—somewhere—for hours,” she said. “And I dreamed I found little Allan—but I don’t know where. It was horrible to wake up feeling that I had known just immediately before I woke and had forgotten.”
“I slept like a log,” said Ilse, yawning. “I didn’t even dream. Emily, I want to get away from this house and this place as soon as I can. I feel as if I were in a nightmare—as if something horrible were pressing me down and I couldn’t escape from it. It would be different if I could do anything—help in any way. But since I can’t, I just want to escape from it. I forgot it for a few minutes while the old lady was telling her story—heartless old thing! She wasn’t worrying one bit about poor little lost Allan.”
