The Vow of Emily

Too Long; Didn't Read

IN Dean Priest Emily found, for the first time since her father had died, a companion who could fully sympathize. She was always at her best with him, with a delightful feeling of being understood. To love is easy and therefore common—but to understand—how rare it is! They roamed wonderlands of fancy together in the magic August days that followed upon Emily’s adventure on the bay shore, talked together of exquisite, immortal things, and were at home with “nature’s old felicities” of which Wordsworth so happily speaks. Emily showed him all the poetry and “descriptions” in her “Jimmy-book” and he read them gravely, and, exactly as Father had done, made little criticisms that did not hurt her because she knew they were just. As for Dean Priest, a certain secret well-spring of fancy that had long seemed dry bubbled up in him sparklingly again. “You make me believe in fairies, whether I will or no,” he told her, “and that means youth. As long as you believe in fairies you can’t grow old.” “But I can’t believe in fairies myself,” protested Emily sorrowfully. “I wish I could.”