Free Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis by Miss Read

Maud's auburn tangles had soon led to Dolly's head scratching, her mother's shocked discoveries, and the tight tying-back of poor Dolly's locks on school days. The feeling of wind in her hair enhanced the delights of the day as the child kept a look-out for the new cottage.
    At last a bend in the road revealed it—a snug, thatched, tight little beauty of a house, set behind a thick hedge just quickening to green. The cart slurred to a stop, the noises ceased, and the full quiet harmony of the wide countryside became apparent.

    Jim lifted the two children down. He and Mary began to busy themselves with the load, helped by the vociferous Ada. Dolly, as if in a trance, pushed open the small gate and wandered past the cottage to the end of the garden. She had never realised that the world was so big.
    Before her, beyond the garden hedge, sloped the gentle flanks of the downs with Hundred Acre Field at the base, and their tops, hazy in the distance, fading into the blue of the sky. Birds sang in the hedges, in the trees, and far above her in the blue and white sky. The happiness which had warmed Dolly in the flower-lit meadow on her way to her grandmother's returned to her with renewed strength.
    She felt as a minnow, long held captive in a jam jar, must feel on being released into a brook; or as a bird set free from a cage into the limitless air. This was her element. These crisscross currents of scent-laden air, spangled with bird-song, splashed with sunshine, flowed around her, lifting her spirits and quickening her senses.
    Dolly Clare had come home.

    Now, a lifetime later, white-haired Miss Clare stood in the same garden, gazing at the same view and drawing from it the same comfort and strength which it had always given. Her hands were full of roses. Some would stand in the small sitting room, but the choicest would be put beside Emily Davis's bed in the spare bedroom.
    The thought of Emily reminded Miss Clare again of the lost doll. It was dusk, she recalled, before the first Emily had been missed. Distressed though she was, little Dolly had been less upset than her parents feared, for the enchantment of the day still possessed her.

    'I'll see Jim tomorrow,' promised Francis. 'He'll have her safe, never fear.'
    But Emily was not with Jim. She had fallen from the back of the cart and lay face downward at the side of the lane between Caxley and Beech Green. A ten-year-old boy, who had spent the morning rattling two stones in a tin to scare the birds from his master's crop, found her as he went home to dinner. He turned her over with the broken toe-cap of his boot, and snorted with scorn.
    'Some kid's old dolly!' he shouted to the wind, and booted it, in a magnificent arc, over the hedge.
    It was a week before she was found, and Dolly had shed many tears of mourning. A man, cutting back the hedge, had discovered the sodden doll and taken it to the local shop, where Francis later collected it.
    'There, my dear,' he said to Dolly, 'now you can be happy again.'
    Dolly took the long-lost doll into her arms, but never completely into her heart again.
    Emily looked so different. She had the pale remote air of one who has been ill for a long time. One eye had gone, and though Mary sewed two white linen shirt buttons in place of her former eyes, this only added to the strangeness of the doll in her young mistress's eyes. She cared for her as zealously as she had always done, putting her to bed, tying on the red cloak before taking her into the garden, and propping a cushion behind her back when she sat at table. But the glory was gone.
    It may have been that the new living Emily had taken her place. Certainly she had become very dear to young Dolly.
    'And still is,' said old Miss Clare, stirring herself from her reminiscences.
    The clock struck twelve inside the house, and from the distant village school Miss Clare heard the shouts of children released from bondage.

    'I've done nothing but day-dream,' Miss Clare told herself,