I

"MAY 4, 19--

"One o'clock is a somewhat unearthly hour to be writing in a journal. The truth is, I've been undergoing a white night. I can't sleep and I'm tired of lying in the dark fancying things--unpleasant things--so I've lighted my candle and hunted up my old diary to 'write it out.'

"I've never written in this journal since the night I burned my book and fell downstairs--and died. Coming back to life to find everything changed and all things made new. And unfamiliar and dreadful. It seems a lifetime ago. As I turn over the pages and glance at those gay, light-hearted entries I wonder if they were really written by me, Emily Byrd Starr.

"Night is beautiful when you are happy--comforting when you are in grief--terrible when you are lonely and unhappy. And to-night I have been horribly lonely. Misery overwhelmed me. I seem never to be able to stop half-way in any emotion and when loneliness does seize hold on me it takes possession of me body and soul and wrings me in its blank pain until all strength and courage go out of me. To-night I am lonely--lonely. Love will not come to me--friendship is lost to me--most of all, as I verily feel, I cannot write. I have tried repeatedly and failed. The old creative fire seems to have burned out into ashes and I cannot rekindle it. All the evening I tried to write a story--a wooden thing in which wooden puppets moved when I jerked the strings. I finally tore it into a thousand pieces and felt that I did God service.

"These past weeks have been bitter ones. Dean has gone--where I know not. He has never written--never will, I suppose. Not to be getting letters from Dean when he is away seems strange and unnatural.

"And yet it is terribly sweet to be free once more.

"Ilse writes me that she is to be home for July and August. Also that Teddy will be, too. Perhaps this latter fact partly accounts for my white night. I want to run away before he comes.

"I have never answered the letter he wrote me after the sinking of the Flavian. I could not. I could not write of that. And if when he comes he speaks of it--I shall not be able to bear it. Will he guess that it is because I love him that I was able to set at naught the limitations of time and space to save him? I am ready to die of shame at thought of it. And at thought of what I said to Mrs. Kent. Yet somehow I have never been able to wish that unsaid. There was a strange relief in the stark honesty of it. I am not afraid she will ever tell him what I said. She would never have him know I cared if she could prevent it

"But I'd like to know how I am to get through the summer.

"There are times when I hate life. Other times again when I love it fiercely with an agonized realization of how beautiful it is--or might be--if--

"Before Dean went away he boarded up all the windows of the Disappointed House. I never go where I can see it. But I do see it for all that. Waiting there on its hill--waiting--dumb--blind. I have never taken my things out of it--which Aunt Elizabeth thinks a sure indication of insanity. And I don't think Dean did either. Nothing has been touched. Mona Lisa is still mocking in the gloom and Elizabeth Bas is tolerantly contemptuous of temperamental idiots and the Lady Giovanna understands it all. My dear little house! And it is never to be a home. I feel as I felt that evening years ago when I followed the rainbow--and lost it. 'There will be other rainbows' I said then. But will there be?"

II

"MAY 15, 19--

"This has been a lyric spring day--and a miracle has happened. It happened at dawn--when I was leaning out of my window, listening to a little, whispering, tricksy wind o' morning blowing out of Lofty John's bush. Suddenly--the flash came--again--after these long months of absence--my old, inexpressible glimpse of eternity. And all at once I knew I could write. I rushed to my desk and seized my pen. All the hours of early morning I wrote; and when I heard Cousin Jimmy going downstairs I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.

Get leave to work--
In this world 'tis the best you get at all,
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.

"So wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning--and truly. It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse--until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted--which we feel we are sent into the world to do--what a blessing it is and what fulness of joy it holds. I felt this to-day as the old fever burned in my finger-tips and my pen once more seemed a friend.

"'Leave to work'--one would think any one could obtain so much. But sometimes anguish and heartbreak forbid us the leave. And then we realize what we have lost and know that it is better to be cursed by God than forgotten by Him. If He had punished Adam and Eve by sending them out to idleness, then indeed they would have been outcast and accursed. Not all the dreams of Eden 'whence the four great rivers flow' could have been as sweet as those I am dreaming to-night, because the power to work has come back to me.

"Oh, God, as long as I live give me 'leave to work.' Thus pray I. Leave and courage."

III

"MAY 25, 19--

"Dear sunshine, what a potent medicine you are. All day I revelled in the loveliness of the wonderful white bridal world. And to-night I washed my soul free from dust in the aerial bath of a spring twilight. I chose the old hill road over the Delectable Mountain for its solitude and wandered happily along, pausing every few moments to think out fully some thought or fancy that came to me like a winged spirit. Then I prowled about the hill fields till long after dark, studying the stars with my field-glass. When I came in I felt as if I had been millions of miles away in the blue ether and all my old familiar surroundings seemed momentarily forgotten and strange.

"But there was one star at which I did not look. Vega of the Lyre."

IV

"MAY 30, 19--

"This evening, just when I was in the middle of a story Aunt Elizabeth said she wanted me to weed the onion-bed. So I had to lay down my pen and go out to the kitchen garden. But one can weed onions and think wonderful things at the same time, glory be. It is one of the blessings that we don't always have to put our souls into what our hands may be doing, praise the gods--for otherwise who would have any soul left? So I weeded the onion-bed and roamed the Milky Way in imagination."

V

"JUNE 10, 19--

"Cousin Jimmy and I felt like murderers last night. We were. Baby-killers at that!

"It is one of the springs when there is a crop of maple-trees. Every key that fell from a maple this year seems to have grown. All over the lawn and garden and old orchard tiny maple-trees have sprung up by the hundreds. And of course they have to be rooted out. It would never do to let them grow. So we pulled them up all day yesterday and felt so mean and guilty over it. The dear, tiny, baby things. They have a right to grow--a right to keep on growing into great, majestic, splendid trees. Who are we to deny it to them? I caught Cousin Jimmy in tears over the brutal necessity.

"'I sometimes think,' he whispered, 'that it's wrong to prevent anything from growing. I never grew up--not in my head.'

"And last night I had a horrible dream of being pursued by thousands of indignant young maple-tree ghosts. They crowded around me--tripped me up--thrashed me with their boughs--smothered me with their leaves. And I woke gasping for breath and nearly frightened to death, but with a splendid idea for a story in my head--The Vengeance of the Tree."

VI

"JUNE 15, 19--

"I picked strawberries on the banks of Blair Water this afternoon among the windy, sweet-smelling grasses. I love picking strawberries. The occupation has in it something of perpetual youth. The gods might have picked strawberries on high Olympus without injuring their dignity. A queen--or a poet--might stoop to it; a beggar has the privilege.

"And to-night I've been sitting here in my dear old room, with my dear books and dear pictures and dear little window of the kinky panes, dreaming in the soft, odorous summer twilight, while the robins are calling to each other in Lofty John's bush and the poplars are talking eerily of old, forgotten things.

"After all, it's not a bad old world--and the folks in it are not half bad either. Even Emily Byrd Star is decent in spots. Not altogether the false, fickle, ungrateful perversity she thinks she is in the wee sma's--not altogether the friendless, forgotten maiden she imagines she is on white nights--not altogether the failure she supposes bitterly when three MSS. are rejected in succession. And not altogether the coward she feels herself to be when she thinks of Frederick Kent's coming to Blair Water in July."