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CHAPTER XXIV Enter Jonas
"PROSPECT POINT, "August 20th. "Dear Anne--spelled--with--an--E," wrote
Phil, "I must prop my eyelids open long enough to write you.
I've neglected you shamefully this summer, honey, but all my other correspondents have
been neglected, too.
I have a huge pile of letters to answer, so I must gird up the loins of my mind and hoe
in. Excuse my mixed metaphors.
I'm fearfully sleepy.
Last night Cousin Emily and I were calling at a neighbor's.
There were several other callers there, and as soon as those unfortunate creatures
left, our hostess and her three daughters picked them all to pieces.
I knew they would begin on Cousin Emily and me as soon as the door shut behind us.
When we came home Mrs. Lilly informed us that the aforesaid neighbor's hired boy was
supposed to be down with scarlet fever.
You can always trust Mrs. Lilly to tell you cheerful things like that.
I have a horror of scarlet fever. I couldn't sleep when I went to bed for
thinking of it.
I tossed and tumbled about, dreaming fearful dreams when I did snooze for a
minute; and at three I wakened up with a high fever, a sore throat, and a raging
headache.
I knew I had scarlet fever; I got up in a panic and hunted up Cousin Emily's 'doctor
book' to read up the symptoms. Anne, I had them all.
So I went back to bed, and knowing the worst, slept like a top the rest of the
night. Though why a top should sleep sounder than
anything else I never could understand.
But this morning I was quite well, so it couldn't have been the fever.
I suppose if I did catch it last night it couldn't have developed so soon.
I can remember that in daytime, but at three o'clock at night I never can be
logical. "I suppose you wonder what I'm doing at
Prospect Point.
Well, I always like to spend a month of summer at the shore, and father insists
that I come to his second-cousin Emily's 'select boardinghouse' at Prospect Point.
So a fortnight ago I came as usual.
And as usual old 'Uncle Mark Miller' brought me from the station with his
ancient buggy and what he calls his 'generous purpose' horse.
He is a nice old man and gave me a handful of pink peppermints.
Peppermints always seem to me such a religious sort of candy--I suppose because
when I was a little girl Grandmother Gordon always gave them to me in church.
Once I asked, referring to the smell of peppermints, 'Is that the odor of
sanctity?'
I didn't like to eat Uncle Mark's peppermints because he just fished them
loose out of his pocket, and had to pick some rusty nails and other things from
among them before he gave them to me.
But I wouldn't hurt his dear old feelings for anything, so I carefully sowed them
along the road at intervals.
When the last one was gone, Uncle Mark said, a little rebukingly, 'Ye shouldn't
a'et all them candies to onct, Miss Phil. You'll likely have the stummick-ache.'
"Cousin Emily has only five boarders besides myself--four old ladies and one
young man. My right-hand neighbor is Mrs. Lilly.
She is one of those people who seem to take a gruesome pleasure in detailing all their
many aches and pains and sicknesses.
You cannot mention any ailment but she says, shaking her head, 'Ah, I know too
well what that is'--and then you get all the details.
Jonas declares he once spoke of locomotor ataxia in hearing and she said she knew too
well what that was. She suffered from it for ten years and was
finally cured by a traveling doctor.
"Who is Jonas? Just wait, Anne Shirley.
You'll hear all about Jonas in the proper time and place.
He is not to be mixed up with estimable old ladies.
"My left-hand neighbor at the table is Mrs. Phinney.
She always speaks with a wailing, dolorous voice--you are nervously expecting her to
burst into tears every moment.
She gives you the impression that life to her is indeed a vale of tears, and that a
smile, never to speak of a laugh, is a frivolity truly reprehensible.
She has a worse opinion of me than Aunt Jamesina, and she doesn't love me hard to
atone for it, as Aunty J. does, either. "Miss Maria Grimsby sits cati-corner from
me.
The first day I came I remarked to Miss Maria that it looked a little like rain--
and Miss Maria laughed. I said the road from the station was very
pretty--and Miss Maria laughed.
I said there seemed to be a few mosquitoes left yet--and Miss Maria laughed.
I said that Prospect Point was as beautiful as ever--and Miss Maria laughed.
If I were to say to Miss Maria, 'My father has hanged himself, my mother has taken
poison, my brother is in the penitentiary, and I am in the last stages of
consumption,' Miss Maria would laugh.
She can't help it--she was born so; but is very sad and awful.
"The fifth old lady is Mrs. Grant.
She is a sweet old thing; but she never says anything but good of anybody and so
she is a very uninteresting conversationalist.
"And now for Jonas, Anne.
"That first day I came I saw a young man sitting opposite me at the table, smiling
at me as if he had known me from my cradle.
I knew, for Uncle Mark had told me, that his name was Jonas Blake, that he was a
Theological Student from St. Columbia, and that he had taken charge of the Point
Prospect Mission Church for the summer.
"He is a very ugly young man--really, the ugliest young man I've ever seen.
He has a big, loose-jointed figure with absurdly long legs.
His hair is tow-color and lank, his eyes are green, and his mouth is big, and his
ears--but I never think about his ears if I can help it.
"He has a lovely voice--if you shut your eyes he is adorable--and he certainly has a
beautiful soul and disposition. "We were good chums right way.
Of course he is a graduate of Redmond, and that is a link between us.
We fished and boated together; and we walked on the sands by moonlight.
He didn't look so homely by moonlight and oh, he was nice.
Niceness fairly exhaled from him.
The old ladies--except Mrs. Grant--don't approve of Jonas, because he laughs and
jokes--and because he evidently likes the society of frivolous me better than theirs.
"Somehow, Anne, I don't want him to think me frivolous.
This is ridiculous.
Why should I care what a tow-haired person called Jonas, whom I never saw before
thinks of me? "Last Sunday Jonas preached in the village
church.
I went, of course, but I couldn't realize that Jonas was going to preach.
The fact that he was a minister--or going to be one--persisted in seeming a huge joke
to me.
"Well, Jonas preached. And, by the time he had preached ten
minutes, I felt so small and insignificant that I thought I must be invisible to the
naked eye.
Jonas never said a word about women and he never looked at me.
But I realized then and there what a pitiful, frivolous, small-souled little
butterfly I was, and how horribly different I must be from Jonas' ideal woman.
SHE would be grand and strong and noble.
He was so earnest and tender and true. He was everything a minister ought to be.
I wondered how I could ever have thought him ugly--but he really is!--with those
inspired eyes and that intellectual brow which the roughly-falling hair hid on week
days.
"It was a splendid sermon and I could have listened to it forever, and it made me feel
utterly wretched. Oh, I wish I was like YOU, Anne.
"He caught up with me on the road home, and grinned as cheerfully as usual.
But his grin could never deceive me again. I had seen the REAL Jonas.
I wondered if he could ever see the REAL PHIL--whom NOBODY, not even you, Anne, has
ever seen yet. "'Jonas,' I said--I forgot to call him Mr.
Blake.
Wasn't it dreadful? But there are times when things like that
don't matter--'Jonas, you were born to be a minister.
You COULDN'T be anything else.'
"'No, I couldn't,' he said soberly. 'I tried to be something else for a long
time--I didn't want to be a minister.
But I came to see at last that it was the work given me to do--and God helping me, I
shall try to do it.' "His voice was low and reverent.
I thought that he would do his work and do it well and nobly; and happy the woman
fitted by nature and training to help him do it.
SHE would be no feather, blown about by every fickle wind of fancy.
SHE would always know what hat to put on. Probably she would have only one.
Ministers never have much money.
But she wouldn't mind having one hat or none at all, because she would have Jonas.
"Anne Shirley, don't you dare to say or hint or think that I've fallen in love with
Mr. Blake.
Could I care for a lank, poor, ugly theologue--named Jonas?
As Uncle Mark says, 'It's impossible, and what's more it's improbable.'
"Good night, PHIL."
"P.S. It is impossible--but I am horribly afraid it's true.
I'm happy and wretched and scared. HE can NEVER care for me, I know.
Do you think I could ever develop into a passable minister's wife, Anne?
And WOULD they expect me to lead in prayer? P G."
>
CHAPTER XXV Enter Prince Charming
"I'm contrasting the claims of indoors and out," said Anne, looking from the window of
Patty's Place to the distant pines of the park.
"I've an afternoon to spend in sweet doing nothing, Aunt Jimsie.
Shall I spend it here where there is a cosy fire, a plateful of delicious russets,
three purring and harmonious cats, and two impeccable china dogs with green noses?
Or shall I go to the park, where there is the lure of gray woods and of gray water
lapping on the harbor rocks?"
"If I was as young as you, I'd decide in favor of the park," said Aunt Jamesina,
tickling Joseph's yellow ear with a knitting needle.
"I thought that you claimed to be as young as any of us, Aunty," teased Anne.
"Yes, in my soul. But I'll admit my legs aren't as young as
yours.
You go and get some fresh air, Anne. You look pale lately."
"I think I'll go to the park," said Anne restlessly.
"I don't feel like tame domestic joys today.
I want to feel alone and free and wild. The park will be empty, for every one will
be at the football match."
"Why didn't you go to it?" "'Nobody axed me, sir, she said'--at least,
nobody but that horrid little Dan Ranger.
I wouldn't go anywhere with him; but rather than hurt his poor little tender feelings I
said I wasn't going to the game at all. I don't mind.
I'm not in the mood for football today somehow."
"You go and get some fresh air," repeated Aunt Jamesina, "but take your umbrella, for
I believe it's going to rain.
I've rheumatism in my leg." "Only old people should have rheumatism,
Aunty." "Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her
legs, Anne.
It's only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though.
Thank goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you
might as well go and pick out your coffin."
It was November--the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of
the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines.
Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great
sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.
Anne was not wont to be troubled with soul fog.
But, somehow, since her return to Redmond for this third year, life had not mirrored
her spirit back to her with its old, perfect, sparkling clearness.
Outwardly, existence at Patty's Place was the same pleasant round of work and study
and recreation that it had always been.
On Friday evenings the big, fire-lighted livingroom was crowded by callers and
echoed to endless jest and laughter, while Aunt Jamesina smiled beamingly on them all.
The "Jonas" of Phil's letter came often, running up from St. Columbia on the early
train and departing on the late.
He was a general favorite at Patty's Place, though Aunt Jamesina shook her head and
opined that divinity students were not what they used to be.
"He's VERY nice, my dear," she told Phil, "but ministers ought to be graver and more
dignified." "Can't a man laugh and laugh and be a
Christian still?" demanded Phil.
"Oh, MEN--yes. But I was speaking of MINISTERS, my dear,"
said Aunt Jamesina rebukingly. "And you shouldn't flirt so with Mr. Blake-
-you really shouldn't."
"I'm not flirting with him," protested Phil.
Nobody believed her, except Anne.
The others thought she was amusing herself as usual, and told her roundly that she was
behaving very badly. "Mr. Blake isn't of the Alec-and-Alonzo
type, Phil," said Stella severely.
"He takes things seriously. You may break his heart."
"Do you really think I could?" asked Phil. "I'd love to think so."
"Philippa Gordon!
I never thought you were utterly unfeeling. The idea of you saying you'd love to break
a man's heart!" "I didn't say so, honey.
Quote me correctly.
I said I'd like to think I COULD break it. I would like to know I had the POWER to do
it." "I don't understand you, Phil.
You are leading that man on deliberately-- and you know you don't mean anything by
it." "I mean to make him ask me to marry him if
I can," said Phil calmly.
"I give you up," said Stella hopelessly. Gilbert came occasionally on Friday
evenings.
He seemed always in good spirits, and held his own in the jests and repartee that flew
about. He neither sought nor avoided Anne.
When circumstances brought them in contact he talked to her pleasantly and
courteously, as to any newly-made acquaintance.
The old camaraderie was gone entirely.
Anne felt it keenly; but she told herself she was very glad and thankful that Gilbert
had got so completely over his disappointment in regard to her.
She had really been afraid, that April evening in the orchard, that she had hurt
him terribly and that the wound would be long in healing.
Now she saw that she need not have worried.
Men have died and the worms have eaten them but not for love.
Gilbert evidently was in no danger of immediate dissolution.
He was enjoying life, and he was full of ambition and zest.
For him there was to be no wasting in despair because a woman was fair and cold.
Anne, as she listened to the ceaseless badinage that went on between him and Phil,
wondered if she had only imagined that look in his eyes when she had told him she could
never care for him.
There were not lacking those who would gladly have stepped into Gilbert's vacant
place. But Anne snubbed them without fear and
without reproach.
If the real Prince Charming was never to come she would have none of a substitute.
So she sternly told herself that gray day in the windy park.
Suddenly the rain of Aunt Jamesina's prophecy came with a swish and rush.
Anne put up her umbrella and hurried down the slope.
As she turned out on the harbor road a savage gust of wind tore along it.
Instantly her umbrella turned wrong side out.
Anne clutched at it in despair.
And then--there came a voice close to her. "Pardon me--may I offer you the shelter of
my umbrella?" Anne looked up.
Tall and handsome and distinguished- looking--dark, melancholy, inscrutable
eyes--melting, musical, sympathetic voice-- yes, the very hero of her dreams stood
before her in the flesh.
He could not have more closely resembled her ideal if he had been made to order.
"Thank you," she said confusedly.
"We'd better hurry over to that little pavillion on the point," suggested the
unknown. "We can wait there until this shower is
over.
It is not likely to rain so heavily very long."
The words were very commonplace, but oh, the tone!
And the smile which accompanied them!
Anne felt her heart beating strangely. Together they scurried to the pavilion and
sat breathlessly down under its friendly roof.
Anne laughingly held up her false umbrella.
"It is when my umbrella turns inside out that I am convinced of the total depravity
of inanimate things," she said gaily.
The raindrops sparkled on her shining hair; its loosened rings curled around her neck
and forehead. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes big and
starry.
Her companion looked down at her admiringly.
She felt herself blushing under his gaze. Who could he be?
Why, there was a bit of the Redmond white and scarlet pinned to his coat lapel.
Yet she had thought she knew, by sight at least, all the Redmond students except the
Freshmen.
And this courtly youth surely was no Freshman.
"We are schoolmates, I see," he said, smiling at Anne's colors.
"That ought to be sufficient introduction.
My name is Royal Gardner. And you are the Miss Shirley who read the
Tennyson paper at the Philomathic the other evening, aren't you?"
"Yes; but I cannot place you at all," said Anne, frankly.
"Please, where DO you belong?" "I feel as if I didn't belong anywhere yet.
I put in my Freshman and Sophomore years at Redmond two years ago.
I've been in Europe ever since. Now I've come back to finish my Arts
course."
"This is my Junior year, too," said Anne. "So we are classmates as well as
collegemates.
I am reconciled to the loss of the years that the locust has eaten," said her
companion, with a world of meaning in those wonderful eyes of his.
The rain came steadily down for the best part of an hour.
But the time seemed really very short.
When the clouds parted and a burst of pale November sunshine fell athwart the harbor
and the pines Anne and her companion walked home together.
By the time they had reached the gate of Patty's Place he had asked permission to
call, and had received it. Anne went in with cheeks of flame and her
heart beating to her fingertips.
Rusty, who climbed into her lap and tried to kiss her, found a very absent welcome.
Anne, with her soul full of romantic thrills, had no attention to spare just
then for a crop-eared *** cat.
That evening a parcel was left at Patty's Place for Miss Shirley.
It was a box containing a dozen magnificent roses.
Phil pounced impertinently on the card that fell from it, read the name and the
poetical quotation written on the back. "Royal Gardner!" she exclaimed.
"Why, Anne, I didn't know you were acquainted with Roy Gardner!"
"I met him in the park this afternoon in the rain," explained Anne hurriedly.
"My umbrella turned inside out and he came to my rescue with his."
"Oh!" Phil peered curiously at Anne.
"And is that exceedingly commonplace incident any reason why he should send us
longstemmed roses by the dozen, with a very sentimental rhyme?
Or why we should blush divinest rosy-red when we look at his card?
Anne, thy face betrayeth thee." "Don't talk nonsense, Phil.
Do you know Mr. Gardner?"
"I've met his two sisters, and I know of him.
So does everybody worthwhile in Kingsport. The Gardners are among the richest, bluest,
of Bluenoses.
Roy is adorably handsome and clever. Two years ago his mother's health failed
and he had to leave college and go abroad with her--his father is dead.
He must have been greatly disappointed to have to give up his class, but they say he
was perfectly sweet about it. Fee--fi--fo--fum, Anne.
I smell romance.
Almost do I envy you, but not quite. After all, Roy Gardner isn't Jonas."
"You goose!" said Anne loftily. But she lay long awake that night, nor did
she wish for sleep.
Her waking fancies were more alluring than any vision of dreamland.
Had the real Prince come at last?
Recalling those glorious dark eyes which had gazed so deeply into her own, Anne was
very strongly inclined to think he had.
>
CHAPTER XXVI Enter Christine
The girls at Patty's Place were dressing for the reception which the Juniors were
giving for the Seniors in February. Anne surveyed herself in the mirror of the
blue room with girlish satisfaction.
She had a particularly pretty gown on. Originally it had been only a simple little
slip of cream silk with a chiffon overdress.
But Phil had insisted on taking it home with her in the Christmas holidays and
embroidering tiny rosebuds all over the chiffon.
Phil's fingers were deft, and the result was a dress which was the envy of every
Redmond girl.
Even Allie Boone, whose frocks came from Paris, was wont to look with longing eyes
on that rosebud concoction as Anne trailed up the main staircase at Redmond in it.
Anne was trying the effect of a white orchid in her hair.
Roy Gardner had sent her white orchids for the reception, and she knew no other
Redmond girl would have them that night-- when Phil came in with admiring gaze.
"Anne, this is certainly your night for looking handsome.
Nine nights out of ten I can easily outshine you.
The tenth you blossom out suddenly into something that eclipses me altogether.
How do you manage it?" "It's the dress, dear.
Fine feathers."
"'Tisn't. The last evening you flamed out into beauty
you wore your old blue flannel shirtwaist that Mrs. Lynde made you.
If Roy hadn't already lost head and heart about you he certainly would tonight.
But I don't like orchids on you, Anne. No; it isn't jealousy.
Orchids don't seem to BELONG to you.
They're too exotic--too tropical--too insolent.
Don't put them in your hair, anyway." "Well, I won't.
I admit I'm not fond of orchids myself.
I don't think they're related to me. Roy doesn't often send them--he knows I
like flowers I can live with. Orchids are only things you can visit
with."
"Jonas sent me some dear pink rosebuds for the evening--but--he isn't coming himself.
He said he had to lead a prayer-meeting in the slums!
I don't believe he wanted to come.
Anne, I'm horribly afraid Jonas doesn't really care anything about me.
And I'm trying to decide whether I'll pine away and die, or go on and get my B.A. and
be sensible and useful."
"You couldn't possibly be sensible and useful, Phil, so you'd better pine away and
die," said Anne cruelly. "Heartless Anne!"
"Silly Phil!
You know quite well that Jonas loves you." "But--he won't TELL me so.
And I can't MAKE him. He LOOKS it, I'll admit.
But speak-to-me-only-with-thine-eyes isn't a really reliable reason for embroidering
doilies and hemstitching tablecloths. I don't want to begin such work until I'm
really engaged.
It would be tempting Fate." "Mr. Blake is afraid to ask you to marry
him, Phil. He is poor and can't offer you a home such
as you've always had.
You know that is the only reason he hasn't spoken long ago."
"I suppose so," agreed Phil dolefully. "Well"--brightening up--"if he WON'T ask me
to marry him I'll ask him, that's all.
So it's bound to come right. I won't worry.
By the way, Gilbert Blythe is going about constantly with Christine Stuart.
Did you know?"
Anne was trying to fasten a little gold chain about her throat.
She suddenly found the clasp difficult to manage.
WHAT was the matter with it--or with her fingers?
"No," she said carelessly. "Who is Christine Stuart?"
"Ronald Stuart's sister.
She's in Kingsport this winter studying music.
I haven't seen her, but they say she's very pretty and that Gilbert is quite crazy over
her.
How angry I was when you refused Gilbert, Anne.
But Roy Gardner was foreordained for you. I can see that now.
You were right, after all."
Anne did not blush, as she usually did when the girls assumed that her eventual
marriage to Roy Gardner was a settled thing.
All at once she felt rather dull.
Phil's chatter seemed trivial and the reception a bore.
She boxed poor Rusty's ears. "Get off that cushion instantly, you cat,
you!
Why don't you stay down where you belong?" Anne picked up her orchids and went
downstairs, where Aunt Jamesina was presiding over a row of coats hung before
the fire to warm.
Roy Gardner was waiting for Anne and teasing the Sarah-cat while he waited.
The Sarah-cat did not approve of him. She always turned her back on him.
But everybody else at Patty's Place liked him very much.
Aunt Jamesina, carried away by his unfailing and deferential courtesy, and the
pleading tones of his delightful voice, declared he was the nicest young man she
ever knew, and that Anne was a very fortunate girl.
Such remarks made Anne restive.
Roy's wooing had certainly been as romantic as girlish heart could desire, but--she
wished Aunt Jamesina and the girls would not take things so for granted.
When Roy murmured a poetical compliment as he helped her on with her coat, she did not
blush and thrill as usual; and he found her rather silent in their brief walk to
Redmond.
He thought she looked a little pale when she came out of the coeds' dressing room;
but as they entered the reception room her color and sparkle suddenly returned to her.
She turned to Roy with her gayest expression.
He smiled back at her with what Phil called "his deep, black, velvety smile."
Yet she really did not see Roy at all.
She was acutely conscious that Gilbert was standing under the palms just across the
room talking to a girl who must be Christine Stuart.
She was very handsome, in the stately style destined to become rather massive in middle
life.
A tall girl, with large dark-blue eyes, ivory outlines, and a gloss of darkness on
her smooth hair. "She looks just as I've always wanted to
look," thought Anne miserably.
"Rose-leaf complexion--starry violet eyes-- raven hair--yes, she has them all.
It's a wonder her name isn't Cordelia Fitzgerald into the bargain!
But I don't believe her figure is as good as mine, and her nose certainly isn't."
Anne felt a little comforted by this conclusion.
>
CHAPTER XXVII Mutual Confidences
March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that
were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which
gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.
Over the girls at Patty's Place was falling the shadow of April examinations.
They were studying hard; even Phil had settled down to text and notebooks with a
doggedness not to be expected of her. "I'm going to take the Johnson Scholarship
in Mathematics," she announced calmly.
"I could take the one in Greek easily, but I'd rather take the mathematical one
because I want to prove to Jonas that I'm really enormously clever."
"Jonas likes you better for your big brown eyes and your crooked smile than for all
the brains you carry under your curls," said Anne.
"When I was a girl it wasn't considered lady-like to know anything about
Mathematics," said Aunt Jamesina. "But times have changed.
I don't know that it's all for the better.
Can you cook, Phil?" "No, I never cooked anything in my life
except a gingerbread and it was a failure-- flat in the middle and hilly round the
edges.
You know the kind.
But, Aunty, when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook don't you think the brains
that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship will also enable me to learn
cooking just as well?"
"Maybe," said Aunt Jamesina cautiously. "I am not decrying the higher education of
women. My daughter is an M.A.
She can cook, too.
But I taught her to cook BEFORE I let a college professor teach her Mathematics."
In mid-March came a letter from Miss Patty Spofford, saying that she and Miss Maria
had decided to remain abroad for another year.
"So you may have Patty's Place next winter, too," she wrote.
"Maria and I are going to run over Egypt. I want to see the Sphinx once before I
die."
"Fancy those two dames 'running over Egypt'!
I wonder if they'll look up at the Sphinx and knit," laughed Priscilla.
"I'm so glad we can keep Patty's Place for another year," said Stella.
"I was afraid they'd come back.
And then our jolly little nest here would be broken up--and we poor callow nestlings
thrown out on the cruel world of boardinghouses again."
"I'm off for a *** in the park," announced Phil, tossing her book aside.
"I think when I am eighty I'll be glad I went for a walk in the park tonight."
"What do you mean?" asked Anne.
"Come with me and I'll tell you, honey." They captured in their ramble all the
mysteries and magics of a March evening.
Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence--a silence
which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear
if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears.
The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into
the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.
"I'd go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how," declared Phil,
pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green tips of the pines.
"It's all so wonderful here--this great, white stillness, and those dark trees that
always seem to be thinking." "'The woods were God's first temples,'"
quoted Anne softly.
"One can't help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place.
I always feel so near Him when I walk among the pines."
"Anne, I'm the happiest girl in the world," confessed Phil suddenly.
"So Mr. Blake has asked you to marry him at last?" said Anne calmly.
"Yes.
And I sneezed three times while he was asking me.
Wasn't that horrid?
But I said 'yes' almost before he finished- -I was so afraid he might change his mind
and stop. I'm besottedly happy.
I couldn't really believe before that Jonas would ever care for frivolous me."
"Phil, you're not really frivolous," said Anne gravely.
"'Way down underneath that frivolous exterior of yours you've got a dear, loyal,
womanly little soul. Why do you hide it so?"
"I can't help it, Queen Anne.
You are right--I'm not frivolous at heart. But there's a sort of frivolous skin over
my soul and I can't take it off.
As Mrs. Poyser says, I'd have to be hatched over again and hatched different before I
could change it. But Jonas knows the real me and loves me,
frivolity and all.
And I love him. I never was so surprised in my life as I
was when I found out I loved him. I'd never thought it possible to fall in
love with an ugly man.
Fancy me coming down to one solitary beau. And one named Jonas!
But I mean to call him Jo. That's such a nice, crisp little name.
I couldn't nickname Alonzo."
"What about Alec and Alonzo?" "Oh, I told them at Christmas that I never
could marry either of them. It seems so funny now to remember that I
ever thought it possible that I might.
They felt so badly I just cried over both of them--howled.
But I knew there was only one man in the world I could ever marry.
I had made up my own mind for once and it was real easy, too.
It's very delightful to feel so sure, and know it's your own sureness and not
somebody else's."
"Do you suppose you'll be able to keep it up?"
"Making up my mind, you mean? I don't know, but Jo has given me a
splendid rule.
He says, when I'm perplexed, just to do what I would wish I had done when I shall
be eighty.
Anyhow, Jo can make up his mind quickly enough, and it would be uncomfortable to
have too much mind in the same house." "What will your father and mother say?"
"Father won't say much.
He thinks everything I do right. But mother WILL talk.
Oh, her tongue will be as Byrney as her nose.
But in the end it will be all right."
"You'll have to give up a good many things you've always had, when you marry Mr.
Blake, Phil." "But I'll have HIM.
I won't miss the other things.
We're to be married a year from next June. Jo graduates from St. Columbia this spring,
you know.
Then he's going to take a little mission church down on Patterson Street in the
slums. Fancy me in the slums!
But I'd go there or to Greenland's icy mountains with him."
"And this is the girl who would NEVER marry a man who wasn't rich," commented Anne to a
young pine tree.
"Oh, don't cast up the follies of my youth to me.
I shall be poor as gaily as I've been rich. You'll see.
I'm going to learn how to cook and make over dresses.
I've learned how to market since I've lived at Patty's Place; and once I taught a
Sunday School class for a whole summer.
Aunt Jamesina says I'll ruin Jo's career if I marry him.
But I won't.
I know I haven't much sense or sobriety, but I've got what is ever so much better--
the knack of making people like me. There is a man in Bolingbroke who lisps and
always testifies in prayer-meeting.
He says, 'If you can't thine like an electric thtar thine like a candlethtick.'
I'll be Jo's little candlestick." "Phil, you're incorrigible.
Well, I love you so much that I can't make nice, light, congratulatory little
speeches. But I'm heart-glad of your happiness."
"I know.
Those big gray eyes of yours are brimming over with real friendship, Anne.
Some day I'll look the same way at you. You're going to marry Roy, aren't you,
Anne?"
"My dear Philippa, did you ever hear of the famous Betty Baxter, who 'refused a man
before he'd axed her'?
I am not going to emulate that celebrated lady by either refusing or accepting any
one before he 'axes' me." "All Redmond knows that Roy is crazy about
you," said Phil candidly.
"And you DO love him, don't you, Anne?" "I--I suppose so," said Anne reluctantly.
She felt that she ought to be blushing while making such a confession; but she was
not; on the other hand, she always blushed hotly when any one said anything about
Gilbert Blythe or Christine Stuart in her hearing.
Gilbert Blythe and Christine Stuart were nothing to her--absolutely nothing.
But Anne had given up trying to analyze the reason of her blushes.
As for Roy, of course she was in love with him--madly so.
How could she help it?
Was he not her ideal? Who could resist those glorious dark eyes,
and that pleading voice? Were not half the Redmond girls wildly
envious?
And what a charming sonnet he had sent her, with a box of violets, on her birthday!
Anne knew every word of it by heart. It was very good stuff of its kind, too.
Not exactly up to the level of Keats or Shakespeare--even Anne was not so deeply in
love as to think that. But it was very tolerable magazine verse.
And it was addressed to HER--not to Laura or Beatrice or the Maid of Athens, but to
her, Anne Shirley.
To be told in rhythmical cadences that her eyes were stars of the morning--that her
cheek had the flush it stole from the sunrise--that her lips were redder than the
roses of Paradise, was thrillingly romantic.
Gilbert would never have dreamed of writing a sonnet to her eyebrows.
But then, Gilbert could see a joke.
She had once told Roy a funny story--and he had not seen the point of it.
She recalled the chummy laugh she and Gilbert had had together over it, and
wondered uneasily if life with a man who had no sense of humor might not be somewhat
uninteresting in the long run.
But who could expect a melancholy, inscrutable hero to see the humorous side
of things? It would be flatly unreasonable.
>
CHAPTER XXVIII A June Evening
"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June," said
Anne, as she came through the spice and bloom of the twilit orchard to the front
door steps, where Marilla and Mrs. Rachel
were sitting, talking over Mrs. Samson Coates' funeral, which they had attended
that day.
Dora sat between them, diligently studying her lessons; but Davy was sitting tailor-
fashion on the grass, looking as gloomy and depressed as his single dimple would let
him.
"You'd get tired of it," said Marilla, with a sigh.
"I daresay; but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of
it, if it were all as charming as today.
Everything loves June. Davy-boy, why this melancholy November face
in blossom-time?" "I'm just sick and tired of living," said
the youthful pessimist.
"At ten years? Dear me, how sad!"
"I'm not making fun," said Davy with dignity.
"I'm dis--dis--discouraged"--bringing out the big word with a valiant effort.
"Why and wherefore?" asked Anne, sitting down beside him.
"'Cause the new teacher that come when Mr. Holmes got sick give me ten sums to do for
Monday. It'll take me all day tomorrow to do them.
It isn't fair to have to work Saturdays.
Milty Boulter said he wouldn't do them, but Marilla says I've got to.
I don't like Miss Carson a bit." "Don't talk like that about your teacher,
Davy Keith," said Mrs. Rachel severely.
"Miss Carson is a very fine girl. There is no nonsense about her."
"That doesn't sound very attractive," laughed Anne.
"I like people to have a little nonsense about them.
But I'm inclined to have a better opinion of Miss Carson than you have.
I saw her in prayer-meeting last night, and she has a pair of eyes that can't always
look sensible. Now, Davy-boy, take heart of grace.
'Tomorrow will bring another day' and I'll help you with the sums as far as in me
lies. Don't waste this lovely hour 'twixt light
and dark worrying over arithmetic."
"Well, I won't," said Davy, brightening up. "If you help me with the sums I'll have 'em
done in time to go fishing with Milty. I wish old Aunt Atossa's funeral was
tomorrow instead of today.
I wanted to go to it 'cause Milty said his mother said Aunt Atossa would be sure to
rise up in her coffin and say sarcastic things to the folks that come to see her
buried.
But Marilla said she didn't." "Poor Atossa laid in her coffin peaceful
enough," said Mrs. Lynde solemnly. "I never saw her look so pleasant before,
that's what.
Well, there weren't many tears shed over her, poor old soul.
The Elisha Wrights are thankful to be rid of her, and I can't say I blame them a
mite."
"It seems to me a most dreadful thing to go out of the world and not leave one person
behind you who is sorry you are gone," said Anne, shuddering.
"Nobody except her parents ever loved poor Atossa, that's certain, not even her
husband," averred Mrs. Lynde. "She was his fourth wife.
He'd sort of got into the habit of marrying.
He only lived a few years after he married her.
The doctor said he died of dyspepsia, but I shall always maintain that he died of
Atossa's tongue, that's what.
Poor soul, she always knew everything about her neighbors, but she never was very well
acquainted with herself. Well, she's gone anyhow; and I suppose the
next excitement will be Diana's wedding."
"It seems funny and horrible to think of Diana's being married," sighed Anne,
hugging her knees and looking through the gap in the Haunted Wood to the light that
was shining in Diana's room.
"I don't see what's horrible about it, when she's doing so well," said Mrs. Lynde
emphatically. "Fred Wright has a fine farm and he is a
model young man."
"He certainly isn't the wild, dashing, wicked, young man Diana once wanted to
marry," smiled Anne. "Fred is extremely good."
"That's just what he ought to be.
Would you want Diana to marry a wicked man? Or marry one yourself?"
"Oh, no.
I wouldn't want to marry anybody who was wicked, but I think I'd like it if he COULD
be wicked and WOULDN'T. Now, Fred is HOPELESSLY good."
"You'll have more sense some day, I hope," said Marilla.
Marilla spoke rather bitterly. She was grievously disappointed.
She knew Anne had refused Gilbert Blythe.
Avonlea gossip buzzed over the fact, which had leaked out, nobody knew how.
Perhaps Charlie Sloane had guessed and told his guesses for truth.
Perhaps Diana had betrayed it to Fred and Fred had been indiscreet.
At all events it was known; Mrs. Blythe no longer asked Anne, in public or private, if
she had heard lately from Gilbert, but passed her by with a frosty bow.
Anne, who had always liked Gilbert's merry, young-hearted mother, was grieved in secret
over this.
Marilla said nothing; but Mrs. Lynde gave Anne many exasperated digs about it, until
fresh gossip reached that worthy lady, through the medium of Moody Spurgeon
MacPherson's mother, that Anne had another
"beau" at college, who was rich and handsome and good all in one.
After that Mrs. Rachel held her tongue, though she still wished in her inmost heart
that Anne had accepted Gilbert.
Riches were all very well; but even Mrs. Rachel, practical soul though she was, did
not consider them the one essential.
If Anne "liked" the Handsome Unknown better than Gilbert there was nothing more to be
said; but Mrs. Rachel was dreadfully afraid that Anne was going to make the mistake of
marrying for money.
Marilla knew Anne too well to fear this; but she felt that something in the
universal scheme of things had gone sadly awry.
"What is to be, will be," said Mrs. Rachel gloomily, "and what isn't to be happens
sometimes.
I can't help believing it's going to happen in Anne's case, if Providence doesn't
interfere, that's what." Mrs. Rachel sighed.
She was afraid Providence wouldn't interfere; and she didn't dare to.
Anne had wandered down to the Dryad's Bubble and was curled up among the ferns at
the root of the big white birch where she and Gilbert had so often sat in summers
gone by.
He had gone into the newspaper office again when college closed, and Avonlea seemed
very dull without him. He never wrote to her, and Anne missed the
letters that never came.
To be sure, Roy wrote twice a week; his letters were exquisite compositions which
would have read beautifully in a memoir or biography.
Anne felt herself more deeply in love with him than ever when she read them; but her
heart never gave the ***, quick, painful bound at sight of his letters which it had
given one day when Mrs. Hiram Sloane had
handed her out an envelope addressed in Gilbert's black, upright handwriting.
Anne had hurried home to the east gable and opened it eagerly--to find a typewritten
copy of some college society report--"only that and nothing more."
Anne flung the harmless screed across her room and sat down to write an especially
nice epistle to Roy. Diana was to be married in five more days.
The gray house at Orchard Slope was in a turmoil of baking and brewing and boiling
and stewing, for there was to be a big, old-timey wedding.
Anne, of course, was to be bridesmaid, as had been arranged when they were twelve
years old, and Gilbert was coming from Kingsport to be best man.
Anne was enjoying the excitement of the various preparations, but under it all she
carried a little heartache.
She was, in a sense, losing her dear old chum; Diana's new home would be two miles
from Green Gables, and the old constant companionship could never be theirs again.
Anne looked up at Diana's light and thought how it had beaconed to her for many years;
but soon it would shine through the summer twilights no more.
Two big, painful tears welled up in her gray eyes.
"Oh," she thought, "how horrible it is that people have to grow up--and marry--and
CHANGE!"
>
CHAPTER XXIX Diana's Wedding
"After all, the only real roses are the pink ones," said Anne, as she tied white
ribbon around Diana's bouquet in the westward-looking gable at Orchard Slope.
"They are the flowers of love and faith."
Diana was standing nervously in the middle of the room, arrayed in her bridal white,
her black curls frosted over with the film of her wedding veil.
Anne had draped that veil, in accordance with the sentimental compact of years
before.
"It's all pretty much as I used to imagine it long ago, when I wept over your
inevitable marriage and our consequent parting," she laughed.
"You are the bride of my dreams, Diana, with the 'lovely misty veil'; and I am YOUR
bridesmaid. But, alas!
I haven't the puffed sleeves--though these short lace ones are even prettier.
Neither is my heart wholly breaking nor do I exactly hate Fred."
"We are not really parting, Anne," protested Diana.
"I'm not going far away. We'll love each other just as much as ever.
We've always kept that 'oath' of friendship we swore long ago, haven't we?"
"Yes. We've kept it faithfully.
We've had a beautiful friendship, Diana.
We've never marred it by one quarrel or coolness or unkind word; and I hope it will
always be so. But things can't be quite the same after
this.
You'll have other interests. I'll just be on the outside.
But 'such is life' as Mrs. Rachel says.
Mrs. Rachel has given you one of her beloved knitted quilts of the 'tobacco
stripe' pattern, and she says when I am married she'll give me one, too."
"The mean thing about your getting married is that I won't be able to be your
bridesmaid," lamented Diana.
"I'm to be Phil's bridesmaid next June, when she marries Mr. Blake, and then I must
stop, for you know the proverb 'three times a bridesmaid, never a bride,'" said Anne,
peeping through the window over the pink and snow of the blossoming orchard beneath.
"Here comes the minister, Diana." "Oh, Anne," gasped Diana, suddenly turning
very pale and beginning to tremble.
"Oh, Anne--I'm so nervous--I can't go through with it--Anne, I know I'm going to
faint."
"If you do I'll drag you down to the rainwater hogshed and drop you in," said
Anne unsympathetically. "Cheer up, dearest.
Getting married can't be so very terrible when so many people survive the ceremony.
See how cool and composed I am, and take courage."
"Wait till your turn comes, Miss Anne.
Oh, Anne, I hear father coming upstairs. Give me my bouquet.
Is my veil right? Am I very pale?"
"You look just lovely.
Di, darling, kiss me good-bye for the last time.
Diana Barry will never kiss me again." "Diana Wright will, though.
There, mother's calling.
Come." Following the simple, old-fashioned way in
vogue then, Anne went down to the parlor on Gilbert's arm.
They met at the top of the stairs for the first time since they had left Kingsport,
for Gilbert had arrived only that day. Gilbert shook hands courteously.
He was looking very well, though, as Anne instantly noted, rather thin.
He was not pale; there was a flush on his cheek that had burned into it as Anne came
along the hall towards him, in her soft, white dress with lilies-of-the-valley in
the shining masses of her hair.
As they entered the crowded parlor together a little murmur of admiration ran around
the room.
"What a fine-looking pair they are," whispered the impressible Mrs. Rachel to
Marilla.
Fred ambled in alone, with a very red face, and then Diana swept in on her father's
arm. She did not faint, and nothing untoward
occurred to interrupt the ceremony.
Feasting and merry-making followed; then, as the evening waned, Fred and Diana drove
away through the moonlight to their new home, and Gilbert walked with Anne to Green
Gables.
Something of their old comradeship had returned during the informal mirth of the
evening. Oh, it was nice to be walking over that
well-known road with Gilbert again!
The night was so very still that one should have been able to hear the whisper of roses
in blossom--the laughter of daisies--the piping of grasses--many sweet sounds, all
tangled up together.
The beauty of moonlight on familiar fields irradiated the world.
"Can't we take a ramble up Lovers' Lane before you go in?" asked Gilbert as they
crossed the bridge over the Lake of Shining Waters, in which the moon lay like a great,
drowned blossom of gold.
Anne assented readily. Lovers' Lane was a veritable path in a
fairyland that night--a shimmering, mysterious place, full of wizardry in the
white-woven enchantment of moonlight.
There had been a time when such a walk with Gilbert through Lovers' Lane would have
been far too dangerous. But Roy and Christine had made it very safe
now.
Anne found herself thinking a good deal about Christine as she chatted lightly to
Gilbert.
She had met her several times before leaving Kingsport, and had been charmingly
sweet to her. Christine had also been charmingly sweet.
Indeed, they were a most cordial pair.
But for all that, their acquaintance had not ripened into friendship.
Evidently Christine was not a kindred spirit.
"Are you going to be in Avonlea all summer?" asked Gilbert.
"No. I'm going down east to Valley Road next week.
Esther Haythorne wants me to teach for her through July and August.
They have a summer term in that school, and Esther isn't feeling well.
So I'm going to substitute for her.
In one way I don't mind. Do you know, I'm beginning to feel a little
bit like a stranger in Avonlea now? It makes me sorry--but it's true.
It's quite appalling to see the number of children who have shot up into big boys and
girls--really young men and women--these past two years.
Half of my pupils are grown up.
It makes me feel awfully old to see them in the places you and I and our mates used to
fill." Anne laughed and sighed.
She felt very old and mature and wise-- which showed how young she was.
She told herself that she longed greatly to go back to those dear merry days when life
was seen through a rosy mist of hope and illusion, and possessed an indefinable
something that had passed away forever.
Where was it now--the glory and the dream? "'So wags the world away,'" quoted Gilbert
practically, and a trifle absently. Anne wondered if he were thinking of
Christine.
Oh, Avonlea was going to be so lonely now-- with Diana gone!
>
CHAPTER *** Mrs. Skinner's Romance
Anne stepped off the train at Valley Road station and looked about to see if any one
had come to meet her.
She was to board with a certain Miss Janet Sweet, but she saw no one who answered in
the least to her preconception of that lady, as formed from Esther's letter.
The only person in sight was an elderly woman, sitting in a wagon with mail bags
piled around her.
Two hundred would have been a charitable guess at her weight; her face was as round
and red as a harvest-moon and almost as featureless.
She wore a tight, black, cashmere dress, made in the fashion of ten years ago, a
little dusty black straw hat trimmed with bows of yellow ribbon, and faded black lace
mits.
"Here, you," she called, waving her whip at Anne.
"Are you the new Valley Road schoolma'am?" "Yes."
"Well, I thought so.
Valley Road is noted for its good-looking schoolma'ams, just as Millersville is noted
for its humly ones. Janet Sweet asked me this morning if I
could bring you out.
I said, 'Sartin I kin, if she don't mind being scrunched up some.
This rig of mine's kinder small for the mail bags and I'm some heftier than
Thomas!'
Just wait, miss, till I shift these bags a bit and I'll tuck you in somehow.
It's only two miles to Janet's. Her next-door neighbor's hired boy is
coming for your trunk tonight.
My name is Skinner--Amelia Skinner." Anne was eventually tucked in, exchanging
amused smiles with herself during the process.
"Jog along, black mare," commanded Mrs. Skinner, gathering up the reins in her
pudgy hands. "This is my first trip on the mail rowte.
Thomas wanted to hoe his turnips today so he asked me to come.
So I jest sot down and took a standing-up snack and started.
I sorter like it.
O' course it's rather tejus. Part of the time I sits and thinks and the
rest I jest sits. Jog along, black mare.
I want to git home airly.
Thomas is terrible lonesome when I'm away. You see, we haven't been married very
long." "Oh!" said Anne politely.
"Just a month.
Thomas courted me for quite a spell, though.
It was real romantic." Anne tried to picture Mrs. Skinner on
speaking terms with romance and failed.
"Oh?" she said again. "Yes.
Y'see, there was another man after me. Jog along, black mare.
I'd been a widder so long folks had given up expecting me to marry again.
But when my darter--she's a schoolma'am like you--went out West to teach I felt
real lonesome and wasn't nowise sot against the idea.
Bime-by Thomas began to come up and so did the other feller--William Obadiah ***,
his name was.
For a long time I couldn't make up my mind which of them to take, and they kep' coming
and coming, and I kep' worrying. Y'see, W.O. was rich--he had a fine place
and carried considerable style.
He was by far the best match. Jog along, black mare."
"Why didn't you marry him?" asked Anne. "Well, y'see, he didn't love me," answered
Mrs. Skinner, solemnly.
Anne opened her eyes widely and looked at Mrs. Skinner.
But there was not a glint of humor on that lady's face.
Evidently Mrs. Skinner saw nothing amusing in her own case.
"He'd been a widder-man for three yers, and his sister kept house for him.
Then she got married and he just wanted some one to look after his house.
It was worth looking after, too, mind you that.
It's a handsome house.
Jog along, black mare. As for Thomas, he was poor, and if his
house didn't leak in dry weather it was about all that could be said for it, though
it looks kind of pictureaskew.
But, y'see, I loved Thomas, and I didn't care one red cent for W.O.
So I argued it out with myself.
'Sarah Crowe,' say I--my first was a Crowe- -'you can marry your rich man if you like
but you won't be happy. Folks can't get along together in this
world without a little bit of love.
You'd just better tie up to Thomas, for he loves you and you love him and nothing else
ain't going to do you.' Jog along, black mare.
So I told Thomas I'd take him.
All the time I was getting ready I never dared drive past W.O.'s place for fear the
sight of that fine house of his would put me in the swithers again.
But now I never think of it at all, and I'm just that comfortable and happy with
Thomas. Jog along, black mare."
"How did William Obadiah take it?" queried Anne.
"Oh, he rumpussed a bit.
But he's going to see a skinny old maid in Millersville now, and I guess she'll take
him fast enough. She'll make him a better wife than his
first did.
W.O. never wanted to marry her. He just asked her to marry him 'cause his
father wanted him to, never dreaming but that she'd say 'no.'
But mind you, she said 'yes.'
There was a predicament for you. Jog along, black mare.
She was a great housekeeper, but most awful mean.
She wore the same bonnet for eighteen years.
Then she got a new one and W.O. met her on the road and didn't know her.
Jog along, black mare.
I feel that I'd a narrer escape. I might have married him and been most
awful miserable, like my poor cousin, Jane Ann.
Jane Ann married a rich man she didn't care anything about, and she hasn't the life of
a dog. She come to see me last week and says, says
she, 'Sarah Skinner, I envy you.
I'd rather live in a little hut on the side of the road with a man I was fond of than
in my big house with the one I've got.'
Jane Ann's man ain't such a bad sort, nuther, though he's so contrary that he
wears his fur coat when the thermometer's at ninety.
The only way to git him to do anything is to coax him to do the opposite.
But there ain't any love to smooth things down and it's a poor way of living.
Jog along, black mare.
There's Janet's place in the hollow-- 'Wayside,' she calls it.
Quite pictureaskew, ain't it? I guess you'll be glad to git out of this,
with all them mail bags jamming round you."
"Yes, but I have enjoyed my drive with you very much," said Anne sincerely.
"Git away now!" said Mrs. Skinner, highly flattered.
"Wait till I tell Thomas that.
He always feels dretful tickled when I git a compliment.
Jog along, black mare. Well, here we are.
I hope you'll git on well in the school, miss.
There's a short cut to it through the ma'sh back of Janet's.
If you take that way be awful keerful.
If you once got stuck in that black mud you'd be sucked right down and never seen
or heard tell of again till the day of judgment, like Adam Palmer's cow.
Jog along, black mare."
>
CHAPTER XXXI Anne to Philippa
"Anne Shirley to Philippa Gordon, greeting. "Well-beloved, it's high time I was writing
you.
Here am I, installed once more as a country 'schoolma'am' at Valley Road, boarding at
'Wayside,' the home of Miss Janet Sweet.
Janet is a dear soul and very nicelooking; tall, but not over-tall; stoutish, yet with
a certain restraint of outline suggestive of a thrifty soul who is not going to be
overlavish even in the matter of avoirdupois.
She has a knot of soft, crimpy, brown hair with a thread of gray in it, a sunny face
with rosy cheeks, and big, kind eyes as blue as forget-me-nots.
Moreover, she is one of those delightful, old-fashioned cooks who don't care a bit if
they ruin your digestion as long as they can give you feasts of fat things.
"I like her; and she likes me--principally, it seems, because she had a sister named
Anne who died young. "'I'm real glad to see you,' she said
briskly, when I landed in her yard.
'My, you don't look a mite like I expected. I was sure you'd be dark--my sister Anne
was dark. And here you're redheaded!'
"For a few minutes I thought I wasn't going to like Janet as much as I had expected at
first sight.
Then I reminded myself that I really must be more sensible than to be prejudiced
against any one simply because she called my hair red.
Probably the word 'auburn' was not in Janet's vocabulary at all.
"'Wayside' is a dear sort of little spot.
The house is small and white, set down in a delightful little hollow that drops away
from the road. Between road and house is an orchard and
flower-garden all mixed up together.
The front door walk is bordered with quahog clam-shells--'cow-hawks,' Janet calls them;
there is Virginia Creeper over the porch and moss on the roof.
My room is a neat little spot 'off the parlor'--just big enough for the bed and
me.
Over the head of my bed there is a picture of Robby Burns standing at Highland Mary's
grave, shadowed by an enormous weeping willow tree.
Robby's face is so lugubrious that it is no wonder I have bad dreams.
Why, the first night I was here I dreamed I COULDN'T LAUGH.
"The parlor is tiny and neat.
Its one window is so shaded by a huge willow that the room has a grotto-like
effect of emerald gloom.
There are wonderful tidies on the chairs, and gay mats on the floor, and books and
cards carefully arranged on a round table, and vases of dried grass on the mantel-
piece.
Between the vases is a cheerful decoration of preserved coffin plates--five in all,
pertaining respectively to Janet's father and mother, a brother, her sister Anne, and
a hired man who died here once!
If I go suddenly insane some of these days 'know all men by these presents' that those
coffin-plates have caused it. "But it's all delightful and I said so.
Janet loved me for it, just as she detested poor Esther because Esther had said so much
shade was unhygienic and had objected to sleeping on a feather bed.
Now, I glory in feather-beds, and the more unhygienic and feathery they are the more I
glory.
Janet says it is such a comfort to see me eat; she had been so afraid I would be like
Miss Haythorne, who wouldn't eat anything but fruit and hot water for breakfast and
tried to make Janet give up frying things.
Esther is really a dear girl, but she is rather given to fads.
The trouble is that she hasn't enough imagination and HAS a tendency to
indigestion.
"Janet told me I could have the use of the parlor when any young men called!
I don't think there are many to call.
I haven't seen a young man in Valley Road yet, except the next-door hired boy--Sam
Toliver, a very tall, lank, tow-haired youth.
He came over one evening recently and sat for an hour on the garden fence, near the
front porch where Janet and I were doing fancy-work.
The only remarks he volunteered in all that time were, 'Hev a peppermint, miss!
Dew now-fine thing for carARRH, peppermints,' and, 'Powerful lot o' jump-
grasses round here ternight.
Yep.' "But there is a love affair going on here.
It seems to be my fortune to be mixed up, more or less actively, with elderly love
affairs.
Mr. and Mrs. Irving always say that I brought about their marriage.
Mrs. Stephen Clark of Carmody persists in being most grateful to me for a suggestion
which somebody else would probably have made if I hadn't.
I do really think, though, that Ludovic Speed would never have got any further
along than placid courtship if I had not helped him and Theodora Dix out.
"In the present affair I am only a passive spectator.
I've tried once to help things along and made an awful mess of it.
So I shall not meddle again.
I'll tell you all about it when we meet."
>
CHAPTER XXXII Tea with Mrs. Douglas
On the first Thursday night of Anne's sojourn in Valley Road Janet asked her to
go to prayer-meeting. Janet blossomed out like a rose to attend
that prayer-meeting.
She wore a pale-blue, pansy-sprinkled muslin dress with more ruffles than one
would ever have supposed economical Janet could be guilty of, and a white leghorn hat
with pink roses and three ostrich feathers on it.
Anne felt quite amazed.
Later on, she found out Janet's motive in so arraying herself--a motive as old as
Eden. Valley Road prayer-meetings seemed to be
essentially feminine.
There were thirty-two women present, two half-grown boys, and one solitary man,
beside the minister. Anne found herself studying this man.
He was not handsome or young or graceful; he had remarkably long legs--so long that
he had to keep them coiled up under his chair to dispose of them--and he was stoop-
shouldered.
His hands were big, his hair wanted barbering, and his moustache was unkempt.
But Anne thought she liked his face; it was kind and honest and tender; there was
something else in it, too--just what, Anne found it hard to define.
She finally concluded that this man had suffered and been strong, and it had been
made manifest in his face.
There was a sort of patient, humorous endurance in his expression which indicated
that he would go to the stake if need be, but would keep on looking pleasant until he
really had to begin squirming.
When prayer-meeting was over this man came up to Janet and said,
"May I see you home, Janet?"
Janet took his arm--"as primly and shyly as if she were no more than sixteen, having
her first escort home," Anne told the girls at Patty's Place later on.
"Miss Shirley, permit me to introduce Mr. Douglas," she said stiffly.
Mr. Douglas nodded and said, "I was looking at you in prayer-meeting, miss, and
thinking what a nice little girl you were."
Such a speech from ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have annoyed Anne
bitterly; but the way in which Mr. Douglas said it made her feel that she had received
a very real and pleasing compliment.
She smiled appreciatively at him and dropped obligingly behind on the moonlit
road. So Janet had a beau!
Anne was delighted.
Janet would make a paragon of a wife-- cheery, economical, tolerant, and a very
queen of cooks. It would be a flagrant waste on Nature's
part to keep her a permanent old maid.
"John Douglas asked me to take you up to see his mother," said Janet the next day.
"She's bed-rid a lot of the time and never goes out of the house.
But she's powerful fond of company and always wants to see my boarders.
Can you go up this evening?"
Anne assented; but later in the day Mr. Douglas called on his mother's behalf to
invite them up to tea on Saturday evening.
"Oh, why didn't you put on your pretty pansy dress?" asked Anne, when they left
home.
It was a hot day, and poor Janet, between her excitement and her heavy black cashmere
dress, looked as if she were being broiled alive.
"Old Mrs. Douglas would think it terrible frivolous and unsuitable, I'm afraid.
John likes that dress, though," she added wistfully.
The old Douglas homestead was half a mile from "Wayside" cresting a windy hill.
The house itself was large and comfortable, old enough to be dignified, and girdled
with maple groves and orchards.
There were big, trim barns behind it, and everything bespoke prosperity.
Whatever the patient endurance in Mr. Douglas' face had meant it hadn't, so Anne
reflected, meant debts and duns.
John Douglas met them at the door and took them into the sitting-room, where his
mother was enthroned in an armchair. Anne had expected old Mrs. Douglas to be
tall and thin, because Mr. Douglas was.
Instead, she was a tiny scrap of a woman, with soft pink cheeks, mild blue eyes, and
a mouth like a baby's.
Dressed in a beautiful, fashionably-made black silk dress, with a fluffy white shawl
over her shoulders, and her snowy hair surmounted by a dainty lace cap, she might
have posed as a grandmother doll.
"How do you do, Janet dear?" she said sweetly.
"I am so glad to see you again, dear." She put up her pretty old face to be
kissed.
"And this is our new teacher. I'm delighted to meet you.
My son has been singing your praises until I'm half jealous, and I'm sure Janet ought
to be wholly so."
Poor Janet blushed, Anne said something polite and conventional, and then everybody
sat down and made talk.
It was hard work, even for Anne, for nobody seemed at ease except old Mrs. Douglas, who
certainly did not find any difficulty in talking.
She made Janet sit by her and stroked her hand occasionally.
Janet sat and smiled, looking horribly uncomfortable in her hideous dress, and
John Douglas sat without smiling.
At the tea table Mrs. Douglas gracefully asked Janet to pour the tea.
Janet turned redder than ever but did it. Anne wrote a description of that meal to
Stella.
"We had cold tongue and chicken and strawberry preserves, lemon pie and tarts
and chocolate cake and raisin cookies and pound cake and fruit cake--and a few other
things, including more pie--caramel pie, I think it was.
After I had eaten twice as much as was good for me, Mrs. Douglas sighed and said she
feared she had nothing to tempt my appetite.
"'I'm afraid dear Janet's cooking has spoiled you for any other,' she said
sweetly. 'Of course nobody in Valley Road aspires to
rival HER.
WON'T you have another piece of pie, Miss Shirley?
You haven't eaten ANYTHING.'
"Stella, I had eaten a helping of tongue and one of chicken, three biscuits, a
generous allowance of preserves, a piece of pie, a tart, and a square of chocolate
cake!"
After tea Mrs. Douglas smiled benevolently and told John to take "dear Janet" out into
the garden and get her some roses.
"Miss Shirley will keep me company while you are out--won't you?" she said
plaintively. She settled down in her armchair with a
sigh.
"I am a very frail old woman, Miss Shirley. For over twenty years I've been a great
sufferer. For twenty long, weary years I've been
dying by inches."
"How painful!" said Anne, trying to be sympathetic and succeeding only in feeling
idiotic.
"There have been scores of nights when they've thought I could never live to see
the dawn," went on Mrs. Douglas solemnly. "Nobody knows what I've gone through--
nobody can know but myself.
Well, it can't last very much longer now. My weary pilgrimage will soon be over, Miss
Shirley.
It is a great comfort to me that John will have such a good wife to look after him
when his mother is gone--a great comfort, Miss Shirley."
"Janet is a lovely woman," said Anne warmly.
"Lovely! A beautiful character," assented Mrs.
Douglas.
"And a perfect housekeeper--something I never was.
My health would not permit it, Miss Shirley.
I am indeed thankful that John has made such a wise choice.
I hope and believe that he will be happy. He is my only son, Miss Shirley, and his
happiness lies very near my heart."
"Of course," said Anne stupidly. For the first time in her life she was
stupid. Yet she could not imagine why.
She seemed to have absolutely nothing to say to this sweet, smiling, angelic old
lady who was patting her hand so kindly. "Come and see me soon again, dear Janet,"
said Mrs. Douglas lovingly, when they left.
"You don't come half often enough. But then I suppose John will be bringing
you here to stay all the time one of these days."
Anne, happening to glance at John Douglas, as his mother spoke, gave a positive start
of dismay.
He looked as a tortured man might look when his tormentors gave the rack the last turn
of possible endurance. She felt sure he must be ill and hurried
poor blushing Janet away.
"Isn't old Mrs. Douglas a sweet woman?" asked Janet, as they went down the road.
"M--m," answered Anne absently. She was wondering why John Douglas had
looked so.
"She's been a terrible sufferer," said Janet feelingly.
"She takes terrible spells. It keeps John all worried up.
He's scared to leave home for fear his mother will take a spell and nobody there
but the hired girl."
>
CHAPTER XXXIII "He Just Kept Coming and Coming"
Three days later Anne came home from school and found Janet crying.
Tears and Janet seemed so incongruous that Anne was honestly alarmed.
"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried anxiously.
"I'm--I'm forty today," sobbed Janet.
"Well, you were nearly that yesterday and it didn't hurt," comforted Anne, trying not
to smile. "But--but," went on Janet with a big gulp,
"John Douglas won't ask me to marry him."
"Oh, but he will," said Anne lamely. "You must give him time, Janet
"Time!" said Janet with indescribable scorn.
"He has had twenty years.
How much time does he want?" "Do you mean that John Douglas has been
coming to see you for twenty years?" "He has.
And he has never so much as mentioned marriage to me.
And I don't believe he ever will now.
I've never said a word to a mortal about it, but it seems to me I've just got to
talk it out with some one at last or go crazy.
John Douglas begun to go with me twenty years ago, before mother died.
Well, he kept coming and coming, and after a spell I begun making quilts and things;
but he never said anything about getting married, only just kept coming and coming.
There wasn't anything I could do.
Mother died when we'd been going together for eight years.
I thought he maybe would speak out then, seeing as I was left alone in the world.
He was real kind and feeling, and did everything he could for me, but he never
said marry. And that's the way it has been going on
ever since.
People blame ME for it. They say I won't marry him because his
mother is so sickly and I don't want the bother of waiting on her.
Why, I'd LOVE to wait on John's mother!
But I let them think so. I'd rather they'd blame me than pity me!
It's so dreadful humiliating that John won't ask me.
And WHY won't he?
Seems to me if I only knew his reason I wouldn't mind it so much."
"Perhaps his mother doesn't want him to marry anybody," suggested Anne.
"Oh, she does.
She's told me time and again that she'd love to see John settled before her time
comes. She's always giving him hints--you heard
her yourself the other day.
I thought I'd ha' gone through the floor." "It's beyond me," said Anne helplessly.
She thought of Ludovic Speed. But the cases were not parallel.
John Douglas was not a man of Ludovic's type.
"You should show more spirit, Janet," she went on resolutely.
"Why didn't you send him about his business long ago?"
"I couldn't," said poor Janet pathetically. "You see, Anne, I've always been awful fond
of John.
He might just as well keep coming as not, for there was never anybody else I'd want,
so it didn't matter." "But it might have made him speak out like
a man," urged Anne.
Janet shook her head. "No, I guess not.
I was afraid to try, anyway, for fear he'd think I meant it and just go.
I suppose I'm a poor-spirited creature, but that is how I feel.
And I can't help it." "Oh, you COULD help it, Janet.
It isn't too late yet.
Take a firm stand. Let that man know you are not going to
endure his shillyshallying any longer. I'LL back you up."
"I dunno," said Janet hopelessly.
"I dunno if I could ever get up enough ***.
Things have drifted so long. But I'll think it over."
Anne felt that she was disappointed in John Douglas.
She had liked him so well, and she had not thought him the sort of man who would play
fast and loose with a woman's feelings for twenty years.
He certainly should be taught a lesson, and Anne felt vindictively that she would enjoy
seeing the process.
Therefore she was delighted when Janet told her, as they were going to prayer-meeting
the next night, that she meant to show some "sperrit."
"I'll let John Douglas see I'm not going to be trodden on any longer."
"You are perfectly right," said Anne emphatically.
When prayer-meeting was over John Douglas came up with his usual request.
Janet looked frightened but resolute. "No, thank you," she said icily.
"I know the road home pretty well alone.
I ought to, seeing I've been traveling it for forty years.
So you needn't trouble yourself, MR. Douglas."
Anne was looking at John Douglas; and, in that brilliant moonlight, she saw the last
twist of the rack again. Without a word he turned and strode down
the road.
"Stop! Stop!"
Anne called wildly after him, not caring in the least for the other dumbfounded
onlookers.
"Mr. Douglas, stop! Come back."
John Douglas stopped but he did not come back.
Anne flew down the road, caught his arm and fairly dragged him back to Janet.
"You must come back," she said imploringly. "It's all a mistake, Mr. Douglas--all my
fault.
I made Janet do it. She didn't want to--but it's all right now,
isn't it, Janet?" Without a word Janet took his arm and
walked away.
Anne followed them meekly home and slipped in by the back door.
"Well, you are a nice person to back me up," said Janet sarcastically.
"I couldn't help it, Janet," said Anne repentantly.
"I just felt as if I had stood by and seen *** done.
I HAD to run after him."
"Oh, I'm just as glad you did. When I saw John Douglas making off down
that road I just felt as if every little bit of joy and happiness that was left in
my life was going with him.
It was an awful feeling." "Did he ask you why you did it?" asked
Anne. "No, he never said a word about it,"
replied Janet dully.
>
CHAPTER XXXIV John Douglas Speaks at Last
Anne was not without a feeble hope that something might come of it after all.
But nothing did.
John Douglas came and took Janet driving, and walked home from prayer-meeting with
her, as he had been doing for twenty years, and as he seemed likely to do for twenty
years more.
The summer waned. Anne taught her school and wrote letters
and studied a little. Her walks to and from school were pleasant.
She always went by way of the swamp; it was a lovely place--a boggy soil, green with
the greenest of mossy hillocks; a silvery brook meandered through it and spruces
stood erectly, their boughs a-trail with
gray-green mosses, their roots overgrown with all sorts of woodland lovelinesses.
Nevertheless, Anne found life in Valley Road a little monotonous.
To be sure, there was one diverting incident.
She had not seen the lank, tow-headed Samuel of the peppermints since the evening
of his call, save for chance meetings on the road.
But one warm August night he appeared, and solemnly seated himself on the rustic bench
by the porch.
He wore his usual working habiliments, consisting of varipatched trousers, a blue
jean shirt, out at the elbows, and a ragged straw hat.
He was chewing a straw and he kept on chewing it while he looked solemnly at
Anne. Anne laid her book aside with a sigh and
took up her doily.
Conversation with Sam was really out of the question.
After a long silence Sam suddenly spoke.
"I'm leaving over there," he said abruptly, waving his straw in the direction of the
neighboring house. "Oh, are you?" said Anne politely.
"Yep."
"And where are you going now?" "Wall, I've been thinking some of gitting a
place of my own. There's one that'd suit me over at
Millersville.
But ef I rents it I'll want a woman." "I suppose so," said Anne vaguely.
"Yep." There was another long silence.
Finally Sam removed his straw again and said,
"Will yeh hev me?" "Wh--a--t!" gasped Anne.
"Will yeh hev me?"
"Do you mean--MARRY you?" queried poor Anne feebly.
"Yep." "Why, I'm hardly acquainted with you,"
cried Anne indignantly.
"But yeh'd git acquainted with me after we was married," said Sam.
Anne gathered up her poor dignity. "Certainly I won't marry you," she said
haughtily.
"Wall, yeh might do worse," expostulated Sam.
"I'm a good worker and I've got some money in the bank."
"Don't speak of this to me again.
Whatever put such an idea into your head?" said Anne, her sense of humor getting the
better of her wrath. It was such an absurd situation.
"Yeh're a likely-looking girl and hev a right-smart way o' stepping," said Sam.
"I don't want no lazy woman. Think it over.
I won't change my mind yit awhile.
Wall, I must be gitting. Gotter milk the cows."
Anne's illusions concerning proposals had suffered so much of late years that there
were few of them left.
So she could laugh wholeheartedly over this one, not feeling any secret sting.
She mimicked poor Sam to Janet that night, and both of them laughed immoderately over
his plunge into sentiment.
One afternoon, when Anne's sojourn in Valley Road was drawing to a close, Alec
Ward came driving down to "Wayside" in hot haste for Janet.
"They want you at the Douglas place quick," he said.
"I really believe old Mrs. Douglas is going to die at last, after pretending to do it
for twenty years."
Janet ran to get her hat. Anne asked if Mrs. Douglas was worse than
usual.
"She's not half as bad," said Alec solemnly, "and that's what makes me think
it's serious. Other times she'd be screaming and throwing
herself all over the place.
This time she's lying still and mum. When Mrs. Douglas is mum she is pretty
sick, you bet." "You don't like old Mrs. Douglas?" said
Anne curiously.
"I like cats as IS cats. I don't like cats as is women," was Alec's
cryptic reply. Janet came home in the twilight.
"Mrs. Douglas is dead," she said wearily.
"She died soon after I got there. She just spoke to me once--'I suppose
you'll marry John now?' she said. It cut me to the heart, Anne.
To think John's own mother thought I wouldn't marry him because of her!
I couldn't say a word either--there were other women there.
I was thankful John had gone out."
Janet began to cry drearily. But Anne brewed her a hot drink of ginger
tea to her comforting.
To be sure, Anne discovered later on that she had used white pepper instead of
ginger; but Janet never knew the difference.
The evening after the funeral Janet and Anne were sitting on the front porch steps
at sunset.
The wind had fallen asleep in the pinelands and lurid sheets of heat-lightning
flickered across the northern skies.
Janet wore her ugly black dress and looked her very worst, her eyes and nose red from
crying.
They talked little, for Janet seemed faintly to resent Anne's efforts to cheer
her up. She plainly preferred to be miserable.
Suddenly the gate-latch clicked and John Douglas strode into the garden.
He walked towards them straight over the geranium bed.
Janet stood up.
So did Anne. Anne was a tall girl and wore a white
dress; but John Douglas did not see her. "Janet," he said, "will you marry me?"
The words burst out as if they had been wanting to be said for twenty years and
MUST be uttered now, before anything else.
Janet's face was so red from crying that it couldn't turn any redder, so it turned a
most unbecoming purple. "Why didn't you ask me before?" she said
slowly.
"I couldn't. She made me promise not to--mother made me
promise not to. Nineteen years ago she took a terrible
spell.
We thought she couldn't live through it. She implored me to promise not to ask you
to marry me while she was alive.
I didn't want to promise such a thing, even though we all thought she couldn't live
very long--the doctor only gave her six months.
But she begged it on her knees, sick and suffering.
I had to promise." "What had your mother against me?" cried
Janet.
"Nothing--nothing. She just didn't want another woman--ANY
woman--there while she was living. She said if I didn't promise she'd die
right there and I'd have killed her.
So I promised. And she's held me to that promise ever
since, though I've gone on my knees to her in my turn to beg her to let me off."
"Why didn't you tell me this?" asked Janet chokingly.
"If I'd only KNOWN! Why didn't you just tell me?"
"She made me promise I wouldn't tell a soul," said John hoarsely.
"She swore me to it on the Bible; Janet, I'd never have done it if I'd dreamed it
was to be for so long.
Janet, you'll never know what I've suffered these nineteen years.
I know I've made you suffer, too, but you'll marry me for all, won't you, Janet?
Oh, Janet, won't you?
I've come as soon as I could to ask you." At this moment the stupefied Anne came to
her senses and realized that she had no business to be there.
She slipped away and did not see Janet until the next morning, when the latter
told her the rest of the story. "That cruel, relentless, deceitful old
woman!" cried Anne.
"Hush--she's dead," said Janet solemnly. "If she wasn't--but she IS.
So we mustn't speak evil of her. But I'm happy at last, Anne.
And I wouldn't have minded waiting so long a bit if I'd only known why."
"When are you to be married?" "Next month.
Of course it will be very quiet.
I suppose people will talk terrible. They'll say I made enough haste to snap
John up as soon as his poor mother was out of the way.
John wanted to let them know the truth but I said, 'No, John; after all she was your
mother, and we'll keep the secret between us, and not cast any shadow on her memory.
I don't mind what people say, now that I know the truth myself.
It don't matter a mite. Let it all be buried with the dead' says I
to him.
So I coaxed him round to agree with me." "You're much more forgiving than I could
ever be," Anne said, rather crossly.
"You'll feel differently about a good many things when you get to be my age," said
Janet tolerantly. "That's one of the things we learn as we
grow older--how to forgive.
It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty."
>
CHAPTER XXXV The Last Redmond Year Opens
"Here we are, all back again, nicely sunburned and rejoicing as a strong man to
run a race," said Phil, sitting down on a suitcase with a sigh of pleasure.
"Isn't it jolly to see this dear old Patty's Place again--and Aunty--and the
cats? Rusty has lost another piece of ear, hasn't
he?"
"Rusty would be the nicest cat in the world if he had no ears at all," declared Anne
loyally from her trunk, while Rusty writhed about her lap in a frenzy of welcome.
"Aren't you glad to see us back, Aunty?" demanded Phil.
"Yes.
But I wish you'd tidy things up," said Aunt Jamesina plaintively, looking at the
wilderness of trunks and suitcases by which the four laughing, chattering girls were
surrounded.
"You can talk just as well later on. Work first and then play used to be my
motto when I was a girl." "Oh, we've just reversed that in this
generation, Aunty.
OUR motto is play your play and then dig in.
You can do your work so much better if you've had a good bout of play first."
"If you are going to marry a minister," said Aunt Jamesina, picking up Joseph and
her knitting and resigning herself to the inevitable with the charming grace that
made her the queen of housemothers, "you
will have to give up such expressions as 'dig in.'"
"Why?" moaned Phil. "Oh, why must a minister's wife be supposed
to utter only prunes and prisms?
I shan't. Everybody on Patterson Street uses slang--
that is to say, metaphorical language--and if I didn't they would think me
insufferably proud and stuck up."
"Have you broken the news to your family?" asked Priscilla, feeding the Sarah-cat bits
from her lunchbasket. Phil nodded.
"How did they take it?"
"Oh, mother rampaged. But I stood rockfirm--even I, Philippa
Gordon, who never before could hold fast to anything.
Father was calmer.
Father's own daddy was a minister, so you see he has a soft spot in his heart for the
cloth. I had Jo up to Mount Holly, after mother
grew calm, and they both loved him.
But mother gave him some frightful hints in every conversation regarding what she had
hoped for me. Oh, my vacation pathway hasn't been exactly
strewn with roses, girls dear.
But--I've won out and I've got Jo. Nothing else matters."
"To you," said Aunt Jamesina darkly. "Nor to Jo, either," retorted Phil.
"You keep on pitying him.
Why, pray? I think he's to be envied.
He's getting brains, beauty, and a heart of gold in ME."
"It's well we know how to take your speeches," said Aunt Jamesina patiently.
"I hope you don't talk like that before strangers.
What would they think?"
"Oh, I don't want to know what they think. I don't want to see myself as others see
me. I'm sure it would be horribly uncomfortable
most of the time.
I don't believe Burns was really sincere in that prayer, either."
"Oh, I daresay we all pray for some things that we really don't want, if we were only
honest enough to look into our hearts," owned Aunt Jamesina candidly.
"I've a notion that such prayers don't rise very far.
I used to pray that I might be enabled to forgive a certain person, but I know now I
really didn't want to forgive her.
When I finally got that I DID want to I forgave her without having to pray about
it." "I can't picture you as being unforgiving
for long," said Stella.
"Oh, I used to be. But holding spite doesn't seem worth while
when you get along in years." "That reminds me," said Anne, and told the
tale of John and Janet.
"And now tell us about that romantic scene you hinted so darkly at in one of your
letters," demanded Phil. Anne acted out Samuel's proposal with great
spirit.
The girls shrieked with laughter and Aunt Jamesina smiled.
"It isn't in good taste to make fun of your beaux," she said severely; "but," she added
calmly, "I always did it myself."
"Tell us about your beaux, Aunty," entreated Phil.
"You must have had any number of them." "They're not in the past tense," retorted
Aunt Jamesina.
"I've got them yet. There are three old widowers at home who
have been casting sheep's eyes at me for some time.
You children needn't think you own all the romance in the world."
"Widowers and sheep's eyes don't sound very romantic, Aunty."
"Well, no; but young folks aren't always romantic either.
Some of my beaux certainly weren't. I used to laugh at them scandalous, poor
boys.
There was Jim Elwood--he was always in a sort of day-dream--never seemed to sense
what was going on. He didn't wake up to the fact that I'd said
'no' till a year after I'd said it.
When he did get married his wife fell out of the sleigh one night when they were
driving home from church and he never missed her.
Then there was Dan Winston.
He knew too much. He knew everything in this world and most
of what is in the next.
He could give you an answer to any question, even if you asked him when the
Judgment Day was to be. Milton Edwards was real nice and I liked
him but I didn't marry him.
For one thing, he took a week to get a joke through his head, and for another he never
asked me. Horatio Reeve was the most interesting beau
I ever had.
But when he told a story he dressed it up so that you couldn't see it for frills.
I never could decide whether he was lying or just letting his imagination run loose."
"And what about the others, Aunty?"
"Go away and unpack," said Aunt Jamesina, waving Joseph at them by mistake for a
needle. "The others were too nice to make fun of.
I shall respect their memory.
There's a box of flowers in your room, Anne.
They came about an hour ago."
After the first week the girls of Patty's Place settled down to a steady grind of
study; for this was their last year at Redmond and graduation honors must be
fought for persistently.
Anne devoted herself to English, Priscilla pored over classics, and Philippa pounded
away at Mathematics.
Sometimes they grew tired, sometimes they felt discouraged, sometimes nothing seemed
worth the struggle for it. In one such mood Stella wandered up to the
blue room one rainy November evening.
Anne sat on the floor in a little circle of light cast by the lamp beside her, amid a
surrounding snow of crumpled manuscript. "What in the world are you doing?"
"Just looking over some old Story Club yarns.
I wanted something to cheer AND inebriate. I'd studied until the world seemed azure.
So I came up here and dug these out of my trunk.
They are so drenched in tears and tragedy that they are excruciatingly funny."
"I'm blue and discouraged myself," said Stella, throwing herself on the couch.
"Nothing seems worthwhile. My very thoughts are old.
I've thought them all before.
What is the use of living after all, Anne?" "Honey, it's just brain *** that makes us
feel that way, and the weather.
A pouring rainy night like this, coming after a hard day's grind, would squelch any
one but a Mark Tapley. You know it IS worthwhile to live."
"Oh, I suppose so.
But I can't prove it to myself just now." "Just think of all the great and noble
souls who have lived and worked in the world," said Anne dreamily.
"Isn't it worthwhile to come after them and inherit what they won and taught?
Isn't it worthwhile to think we can share their inspiration?
And then, all the great souls that will come in the future?
Isn't it worthwhile to work a little and prepare the way for them--make just one
step in their path easier?"
"Oh, my mind agrees with you, Anne. But my soul remains doleful and uninspired.
I'm always grubby and dingy on rainy nights."
"Some nights I like the rain--I like to lie in bed and hear it pattering on the roof
and drifting through the pines." "I like it when it stays on the roof," said
Stella.
"It doesn't always. I spent a gruesome night in an old country
farmhouse last summer. The roof leaked and the rain came pattering
down on my bed.
There was no poetry in THAT.
I had to get up in the 'mirk midnight' and chivy round to pull the bedstead out of the
drip--and it was one of those solid, old- fashioned beds that weigh a ton--more or
less.
And then that drip-drop, drip-drop kept up all night until my nerves just went to
pieces.
You've no idea what an eerie noise a great drop of rain falling with a mushy thud on a
bare floor makes in the night. It sounds like ghostly footsteps and all
that sort of thing.
What are you laughing over, Anne?" "These stories.
As Phil would say they are killing--in more senses than one, for everybody died in
them.
What dazzlingly lovely heroines we had--and how we dressed them!
"Silks--satins--velvets--jewels--laces-- they never wore anything else.
Here is one of Jane Andrews' stories depicting her heroine as sleeping in a
beautiful white satin nightdress trimmed with seed pearls."
"Go on," said Stella.
"I begin to feel that life is worth living as long as there's a laugh in it."
"Here's one I wrote.
My heroine is disporting herself at a ball 'glittering from head to foot with large
diamonds of the first water.' But what booted beauty or rich attire?
'The paths of glory lead but to the grave.'
They must either be murdered or die of a broken heart.
There was no escape for them." "Let me read some of your stories."
"Well, here's my masterpiece.
Note its cheerful title--'My Graves.' I shed quarts of tears while writing it,
and the other girls shed gallons while I read it.
Jane Andrews' mother scolded her frightfully because she had so many
handkerchiefs in the wash that week. It's a harrowing tale of the wanderings of
a Methodist minister's wife.
I made her a Methodist because it was necessary that she should wander.
She buried a child every place she lived in.
There were nine of them and their graves were severed far apart, ranging from
Newfoundland to Vancouver.
I described the children, pictured their several death beds, and detailed their
tombstones and epitaphs.
I had intended to bury the whole nine but when I had disposed of eight my invention
of horrors gave out and I permitted the ninth to live as a hopeless cripple."
While Stella read My Graves, punctuating its tragic paragraphs with chuckles, and
Rusty slept the sleep of a just cat who has been out all night curled up on a Jane
Andrews tale of a beautiful maiden of
fifteen who went to nurse in a *** colony--of course dying of the loathsome
disease finally--Anne glanced over the other manuscripts and recalled the old days
at Avonlea school when the members of the
Story Club, sitting under the spruce trees or down among the ferns by the brook, had
written them. What fun they had had!
How the sunshine and mirth of those olden summers returned as she read.
Not all the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome could weave such
wizardry as those funny, tearful tales of the Story Club.
Among the manuscripts Anne found one written on sheets of wrapping paper.
A wave of laughter filled her gray eyes as she recalled the time and place of its
genesis.
It was the sketch she had written the day she fell through the roof of the Cobb
duckhouse on the Tory Road. Anne glanced over it, then fell to reading
it intently.
It was a little dialogue between asters and sweet-peas, wild canaries in the lilac
bush, and the guardian spirit of the garden.
After she had read it, she sat, staring into space; and when Stella had gone she
smoothed out the crumpled manuscript. "I believe I will," she said resolutely.
>
CHAPTER XXXVI The Gardners'Call
"Here is a letter with an Indian stamp for you, Aunt Jimsie," said Phil.
"Here are three for Stella, and two for Pris, and a glorious fat one for me from
Jo.
There's nothing for you, Anne, except a circular."
Nobody noticed Anne's flush as she took the thin letter Phil tossed her carelessly.
But a few minutes later Phil looked up to see a transfigured Anne.
"Honey, what good thing has happened?"
"The Youth's Friend has accepted a little sketch I sent them a fortnight ago," said
Anne, trying hard to speak as if she were accustomed to having sketches accepted
every mail, but not quite succeeding.
"Anne Shirley! How glorious!
What was it? When is it to be published?
Did they pay you for it?"
"Yes; they've sent a check for ten dollars, and the editor writes that he would like to
see more of my work. Dear man, he shall.
It was an old sketch I found in my box.
I re-wrote it and sent it in--but I never really thought it could be accepted because
it had no plot," said Anne, recalling the bitter experience of Averil's Atonement.
"What are you going to do with that ten dollars, Anne?
Let's all go up town and get drunk," suggested Phil.
"I AM going to squander it in a wild soulless revel of some sort," declared Anne
gaily.
"At all events it isn't tainted money--like the check I got for that horrible Reliable
Baking Powder story. I spent IT usefully for clothes and hated
them every time I put them on."
"Think of having a real live author at Patty's Place," said Priscilla.
"It's a great responsibility," said Aunt Jamesina solemnly.
"Indeed it is," agreed Pris with equal solemnity.
"Authors are kittle cattle. You never know when or how they will break
out.
Anne may make copy of us." "I meant that the ability to write for the
Press was a great responsibility," said Aunt Jamesina severely, "and I hope Anne
realizes, it.
My daughter used to write stories before she went to the foreign field, but now she
has turned her attention to higher things.
She used to say her motto was 'Never write a line you would be ashamed to read at your
own funeral.' You'd better take that for yours, Anne, if
you are going to embark in literature.
Though, to be sure," added Aunt Jamesina perplexedly, "Elizabeth always used to
laugh when she said it.
She always laughed so much that I don't know how she ever came to decide on being a
missionary. I'm thankful she did--I prayed that she
might--but--I wish she hadn't."
Then Aunt Jamesina wondered why those giddy girls all laughed.
Anne's eyes shone all that day; literary ambitions sprouted and budded in her brain;
their exhilaration accompanied her to Jennie Cooper's walking party, and not even
the sight of Gilbert and Christine, walking
just ahead of her and Roy, could quite subdue the sparkle of her starry hopes.
Nevertheless, she was not so rapt from things of earth as to be unable to notice
that Christine's walk was decidedly ungraceful.
"But I suppose Gilbert looks only at her face.
So like a man," thought Anne scornfully. "Shall you be home Saturday afternoon?"
asked Roy.
"Yes." "My mother and sisters are coming to call
on you," said Roy quietly.
Something went over Anne which might be described as a thrill, but it was hardly a
pleasant one.
She had never met any of Roy's family; she realized the significance of his statement;
and it had, somehow, an irrevocableness about it that chilled her.
"I shall be glad to see them," she said flatly; and then wondered if she really
would be glad. She ought to be, of course.
But would it not be something of an ordeal?
Gossip had filtered to Anne regarding the light in which the Gardners viewed the
"infatuation" of son and brother. Roy must have brought pressure to bear in
the matter of this call.
Anne knew she would be weighed in the balance.
From the fact that they had consented to call she understood that, willingly or
unwillingly, they regarded her as a possible member of their clan.
"I shall just be myself.
I shall not TRY to make a good impression," thought Anne loftily.
But she was wondering what dress she would better wear Saturday afternoon, and if the
new style of high hair-dressing would suit her better than the old; and the walking
party was rather spoiled for her.
By night she had decided that she would wear her brown chiffon on Saturday, but
would do her hair low. Friday afternoon none of the girls had
classes at Redmond.
Stella took the opportunity to write a paper for the Philomathic Society, and was
sitting at the table in the corner of the living-room with an untidy litter of notes
and manuscript on the floor around her.
Stella always vowed she never could write anything unless she threw each sheet down
as she completed it.
Anne, in her flannel blouse and serge skirt, with her hair rather blown from her
windy walk home, was sitting squarely in the middle of the floor, teasing the Sarah-
cat with a wishbone.
Joseph and Rusty were both curled up in her lap.
A warm plummy odor filled the whole house, for Priscilla was cooking in the kitchen.
Presently she came in, enshrouded in a huge work-apron, with a smudge of flour on her
nose, to show Aunt Jamesina the chocolate cake she had just iced.
At this auspicious moment the knocker sounded.
Nobody paid any attention to it save Phil, who sprang up and opened it, expecting a
boy with the hat she had bought that morning.
On the doorstep stood Mrs. Gardner and her daughters.
Anne scrambled to her feet somehow, emptying two indignant cats out of her lap
as she did so, and mechanically shifting her wishbone from her right hand to her
left.
Priscilla, who would have had to cross the room to reach the kitchen door, lost her
head, wildly plunged the chocolate cake under a cushion on the inglenook sofa, and
dashed upstairs.
Stella began feverishly gathering up her manuscript.
Only Aunt Jamesina and Phil remained normal.
Thanks to them, everybody was soon sitting at ease, even Anne.
Priscilla came down, apronless and smudgeless, Stella reduced her corner to
decency, and Phil saved the situation by a stream of ready small talk.
Mrs. Gardner was tall and thin and handsome, exquisitely gowned, cordial with
a cordiality that seemed a trifle forced. Aline Gardner was a younger edition of her
mother, lacking the cordiality.
She endeavored to be nice, but succeeded only in being haughty and patronizing.
Dorothy Gardner was slim and jolly and rather tomboyish.
Anne knew she was Roy's favorite sister and warmed to her.
She would have looked very much like Roy if she had had dreamy dark eyes instead of
roguish hazel ones.
Thanks to her and Phil, the call really went off very well, except for a slight
sense of strain in the atmosphere and two rather untoward incidents.
Rusty and Joseph, left to themselves, began a game of chase, and sprang madly into Mrs.
Gardner's silken lap and out of it in their wild career.
Mrs. Gardner lifted her lorgnette and gazed after their flying forms as if she had
never seen cats before, and Anne, choking back slightly nervous laughter, apologized
as best she could.
"You are fond of cats?" said Mrs. Gardner, with a slight intonation of tolerant
wonder.
Anne, despite her affection for Rusty, was not especially fond of cats, but Mrs.
Gardner's tone annoyed her.
Inconsequently she remembered that Mrs. John Blythe was so fond of cats that she
kept as many as her husband would allow. "They ARE adorable animals, aren't they?"
she said wickedly.
"I have never liked cats," said Mrs. Gardner remotely.
"I love them," said Dorothy. "They are so nice and selfish.
Dogs are TOO good and unselfish.
They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human."
"You have two delightful old china dogs there.
May I look at them closely?" said Aline, crossing the room towards the fireplace and
thereby becoming the unconscious cause of the other accident.
Picking up Magog, she sat down on the cushion under which was secreted
Priscilla's chocolate cake. Priscilla and Anne exchanged agonized
glances but could do nothing.
The stately Aline continued to sit on the cushion and discuss china dogs until the
time of departure. Dorothy lingered behind a moment to squeeze
Anne's hand and whisper impulsively.
"I KNOW you and I are going to be chums. Oh, Roy has told me all about you.
I'm the only one of the family he tells things to, poor boy--nobody COULD confide
in mamma and Aline, you know.
What glorious times you girls must have here!
Won't you let me come often and have a share in them?"
"Come as often as you like," Anne responded heartily, thankful that one of Roy's
sisters was likable.
She would never like Aline, so much was certain; and Aline would never like her,
though Mrs. Gardner might be won. Altogether, Anne sighed with relief when
the ordeal was over.
"'Of all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are it might have been,'"
quoted Priscilla tragically, lifting the cushion.
"This cake is now what you might call a flat failure.
And the cushion is likewise ruined. Never tell me that Friday isn't unlucky."
"People who send word they are coming on Saturday shouldn't come on Friday," said
Aunt Jamesina. "I fancy it was Roy's mistake," said Phil.
"That boy isn't really responsible for what he says when he talks to Anne.
Where IS Anne?" Anne had gone upstairs.
She felt oddly like crying.
But she made herself laugh instead. Rusty and Joseph had been TOO awful!
And Dorothy WAS a dear.
>
CHAPTER XXXVII Full-fledged B.A.'s
"I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night," groaned Phil.
"If you live long enough both wishes will come true," said Anne calmly.
"It's easy for you to be serene.
You're at home in Philosophy. I'm not--and when I think of that horrible
paper tomorrow I quail. If I should fail in it what would Jo say?"
"You won't fail.
How did you get on in Greek today?" "I don't know.
Perhaps it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in
his grave.
I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion
of anything. How thankful little Phil will be when all
this examinating is over."
"Examinating? I never heard such a word."
"Well, haven't I as good a right to make a word as any one else?" demanded Phil.
"Words aren't made--they grow," said Anne.
"Never mind--I begin faintly to discern clear water ahead where no examination
breakers loom. Girls, do you--can you realize that our
Redmond Life is almost over?"
"I can't," said Anne, sorrowfully. "It seems just yesterday that Pris and I
were alone in that crowd of Freshmen at Redmond.
And now we are Seniors in our final examinations."
"'Potent, wise, and reverend Seniors,'" quoted Phil.
"Do you suppose we really are any wiser than when we came to Redmond?"
"You don't act as if you were by times," said Aunt Jamesina severely.
"Oh, Aunt Jimsie, haven't we been pretty good girls, take us by and large, these
three winters you've mothered us?" pleaded Phil.
"You've been four of the dearest, sweetest, goodest girls that ever went together
through college," averred Aunt Jamesina, who never spoiled a compliment by misplaced
economy.
"But I mistrust you haven't any too much sense yet.
It's not to be expected, of course. Experience teaches sense.
You can't learn it in a college course.
You've been to college four years and I never was, but I know heaps more than you
do, young ladies."
"'There are lots of things that never go by rule, There's a powerful pile o' knowledge
That you never get at college, There are heaps of things you never learn at
school,'" quoted Stella.
"Have you learned anything at Redmond except dead languages and geometry and such
trash?" queried Aunt Jamesina. "Oh, yes.
I think we have, Aunty," protested Anne.
"We've learned the truth of what Professor Woodleigh told us last Philomathic," said
Phil. "He said, 'Humor is the spiciest condiment
in the feast of existence.
Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength
from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them.'
Isn't that worth learning, Aunt Jimsie?"
"Yes, it is, dearie. When you've learned to laugh at the things
that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn't, you've got wisdom
and understanding."
"What have you got out of your Redmond course, Anne?" murmured Priscilla aside.
"I think," said Anne slowly, "that I really have learned to look upon each little
hindrance as a jest and each great one as the foreshadowing of victory.
Summing up, I think that is what Redmond has given me."
"I shall have to fall back on another Professor Woodleigh quotation to express
what it has done for me," said Priscilla.
"You remember that he said in his address, 'There is so much in the world for us all
if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it
to ourselves--so much in men and women, so
much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for
which to be thankful.' I think Redmond has taught me that in some
measure, Anne."
"Judging from what you all, say" remarked Aunt Jamesina, "the sum and substance is
that you can learn--if you've got natural gumption enough--in four years at college
what it would take about twenty years of living to teach you.
Well, that justifies higher education in my opinion.
It's a matter I was always dubious about before."
"But what about people who haven't natural gumption, Aunt Jimsie?"
"People who haven't natural gumption never learn," retorted Aunt Jamesina, "neither in
college nor life.
If they live to be a hundred they really don't know anything more than when they
were born. It's their misfortune not their fault, poor
souls.
But those of us who have some gumption should duly thank the Lord for it."
"Will you please define what gumption is, Aunt Jimsie?" asked Phil.
"No, I won't, young woman.
Any one who has gumption knows what it is, and any one who hasn't can never know what
it is. So there is no need of defining it."
The busy days flew by and examinations were over.
Anne took High Honors in English. Priscilla took Honors in Classics, and Phil
in Mathematics.
Stella obtained a good all-round showing. Then came Convocation.
"This is what I would once have called an epoch in my life," said Anne, as she took
Roy's violets out of their box and gazed at them thoughtfully.
She meant to carry them, of course, but her eyes wandered to another box on her table.
It was filled with lilies-of-the-valley, as fresh and fragrant as those which bloomed
in the Green Gables yard when June came to Avonlea.
Gilbert Blythe's card lay beside it.
Anne wondered why Gilbert should have sent her flowers for Convocation.
She had seen very little of him during the past winter.
He had come to Patty's Place only one Friday evening since the Christmas
holidays, and they rarely met elsewhere.
She knew he was studying very hard, aiming at High Honors and the Cooper Prize, and he
took little part in the social doings of Redmond.
Anne's own winter had been quite gay socially.
She had seen a good deal of the Gardners; she and Dorothy were very intimate; college
circles expected the announcement of her engagement to Roy any day.
Anne expected it herself.
Yet just before she left Patty's Place for Convocation she flung Roy's violets aside
and put Gilbert's lilies-of-the-valley in their place.
She could not have told why she did it.
Somehow, old Avonlea days and dreams and friendships seemed very close to her in
this attainment of her long-cherished ambitions.
She and Gilbert had once picturedout merrily the day on which they should be
capped and gowned graduates in Arts. The wonderful day had come and Roy's
violets had no place in it.
Only her old friend's flowers seemed to belong to this fruition of old-blossoming
hopes which he had once shared.
For years this day had beckoned and allured to her; but when it came the one single,
keen, abiding memory it left with her was not that of the breathless moment when the
stately president of Redmond gave her cap
and diploma and hailed her B.A.; it was not of the flash in Gilbert's eyes when he saw
her lilies, nor the puzzled pained glance Roy gave her as he passed her on the
platform.
It was not of Aline Gardner's condescending congratulations, or Dorothy's ardent,
impulsive good wishes.
It was of one strange, unaccountable pang that spoiled this long-expected day for her
and left in it a certain faint but enduring flavor of bitterness.
The Arts graduates gave a graduation dance that night.
When Anne dressed for it she tossed aside the pearl beads she usually wore and took
from her trunk the small box that had come to Green Gables on Christmas day.
In it was a thread-like gold chain with a tiny pink enamel heart as a pendant.
On the accompanying card was written, "With all good wishes from your old chum,
Gilbert."
Anne, laughing over the memory the enamel heart conjured up the fatal day when
Gilbert had called her "Carrots" and vainly tried to make his peace with a pink candy
heart, had written him a nice little note of thanks.
But she had never worn the trinket. Tonight she fastened it about her white
throat with a dreamy smile.
She and Phil walked to Redmond together. Anne walked in silence; Phil chattered of
many things. Suddenly she said,
"I heard today that Gilbert Blythe's engagement to Christine Stuart was to be
announced as soon as Convocation was over. Did you hear anything of it?"
"No," said Anne.
"I think it's true," said Phil lightly. Anne did not speak.
In the darkness she felt her face burning. She slipped her hand inside her collar and
caught at the gold chain.
One energetic twist and it gave way. Anne thrust the broken trinket into her
pocket. Her hands were trembling and her eyes were
smarting.
But she was the gayest of all the gay revellers that night, and told Gilbert
unregretfully that her card was full when he came to ask her for a dance.
Afterwards, when she sat with the girls before the dying embers at Patty's Place,
removing the spring chilliness from their satin skins, none chatted more blithely
than she of the day's events.
"Moody Spurgeon MacPherson called here tonight after you left," said Aunt
Jamesina, who had sat up to keep the fire on.
"He didn't know about the graduation dance.
That boy ought to sleep with a rubber band around his head to train his ears not to
stick out. I had a beau once who did that and it
improved him immensely.
It was I who suggested it to him and he took my advice, but he never forgave me for
it." "Moody Spurgeon is a very serious young
man," yawned Priscilla.
"He is concerned with graver matters than his ears.
He is going to be a minister, you know."
"Well, I suppose the Lord doesn't regard the ears of a man," said Aunt Jamesina
gravely, dropping all further criticism of Moody Spurgeon.
Aunt Jamesina had a proper respect for the cloth even in the case of an unfledged
parson.
>
CHAPTER XXXVIII False Dawn
"Just imagine--this night week I'll be in Avonlea--delightful thought!" said Anne,
bending over the box in which she was packing Mrs. Rachel Lynde's quilts.
"But just imagine--this night week I'll be gone forever from Patty's Place--horrible
thought!"
"I wonder if the ghost of all our laughter will echo through the maiden dreams of Miss
Patty and Miss Maria," speculated Phil.
Miss Patty and Miss Maria were coming home, after having trotted over most of the
habitable globe. "We'll be back the second week in May"
wrote Miss Patty.
"I expect Patty's Place will seem rather small after the Hall of the Kings at
Karnak, but I never did like big places to live in.
And I'll be glad enough to be home again.
When you start traveling late in life you're apt to do too much of it because you
know you haven't much time left, and it's a thing that grows on you.
I'm afraid Maria will never be contented again."
"I shall leave here my fancies and dreams to bless the next comer," said Anne,
looking around the blue room wistfully--her pretty blue room where she had spent three
such happy years.
She had knelt at its window to pray and had bent from it to watch the sunset behind the
pines.
She had heard the autumn raindrops beating against it and had welcomed the spring
robins at its sill.
She wondered if old dreams could haunt rooms--if, when one left forever the room
where she had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her,
intangible and invisible, yet nonetheless
real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory.
"I think," said Phil, "that a room where one dreams and grieves and rejoices and
lives becomes inseparably connected with those processes and acquires a personality
of its own.
I am sure if I came into this room fifty years from now it would say 'Anne, Anne' to
me. What nice times we've had here, honey!
What chats and jokes and good chummy jamborees!
Oh, dear me! I'm to marry Jo in June and I know I will
be rapturously happy.
But just now I feel as if I wanted this lovely Redmond life to go on forever."
"I'm unreasonable enough just now to wish that, too," admitted Anne.
"No matter what deeper joys may come to us later on we'll never again have just the
same delightful, irresponsible existence we've had here.
It's over forever, Phil."
"What are you going to do with Rusty?" asked Phil, as that privileged *** padded
into the room.
"I am going to take him home with me and Joseph and the Sarah-cat," announced Aunt
Jamesina, following Rusty.
"It would be a shame to separate those cats now that they have learned to live
together. It's a hard lesson for cats and humans to
learn."
"I'm sorry to part with Rusty," said Anne regretfully, "but it would be no use to
take him to Green Gables. Marilla detests cats, and Davy would tease
his life out.
Besides, I don't suppose I'll be home very long.
I've been offered the principalship of the Summerside High School."
"Are you going to accept it?" asked Phil.
"I--I haven't decided yet," answered Anne, with a confused flush.
Phil nodded understandingly. Naturally Anne's plans could not be settled
until Roy had spoken.
He would soon--there was no doubt of that. And there was no doubt that Anne would say
"yes" when he said "Will you please?" Anne herself regarded the state of affairs
with a seldom-ruffled complacency.
She was deeply in love with Roy. True, it was not just what she had imagined
love to be.
But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of
it?
It was the old diamond disillusion of childhood repeated--the same disappointment
she had felt when she had first seen the chill sparkle instead of the purple
splendor she had anticipated.
"That's not my idea of a diamond," she had said.
But Roy was a dear fellow and they would be very happy together, even if some
indefinable zest was missing out of life.
When Roy came down that evening and asked Anne to walk in the park every one at
Patty's Place knew what he had come to say; and every one knew, or thought they knew,
what Anne's answer would be.
"Anne is a very fortunate girl," said Aunt Jamesina.
"I suppose so," said Stella, shrugging her shoulders.
"Roy is a nice fellow and all that.
But there's really nothing in him." "That sounds very like a jealous remark,
Stella Maynard," said Aunt Jamesina rebukingly.
"It does--but I am not jealous," said Stella calmly.
"I love Anne and I like Roy.
Everybody says she is making a brilliant match, and even Mrs. Gardner thinks her
charming now. It all sounds as if it were made in heaven,
but I have my doubts.
Make the most of that, Aunt Jamesina." Roy asked Anne to marry him in the little
pavilion on the harbor shore where they had talked on the rainy day of their first
meeting.
Anne thought it very romantic that he should have chosen that spot.
And his proposal was as beautifully worded as if he had copied it, as one of Ruby
Gillis' lovers had done, out of a Deportment of Courtship and Marriage.
The whole effect was quite flawless.
And it was also sincere. There was no doubt that Roy meant what he
said. There was no false note to jar the
symphony.
Anne felt that she ought to be thrilling from head to foot.
But she wasn't; she was horribly cool. When Roy paused for his answer she opened
her lips to say her fateful yes.
And then--she found herself trembling as if she were reeling back from a precipice.
To her came one of those moments when we realize, as by a blinding flash of
illumination, more than all our previous years have taught us.
She pulled her hand from Roy's.
"Oh, I can't marry you--I can't--I can't," she cried, wildly.
Roy turned pale--and also looked rather foolish.
He had--small blame to him--felt very sure.
"What do you mean?" he stammered. "I mean that I can't marry you," repeated
Anne desperately. "I thought I could--but I can't."
"Why can't you?"
Roy asked more calmly. "Because--I don't care enough for you."
A crimson streak came into Roy's face. "So you've just been amusing yourself these
two years?" he said slowly.
"No, no, I haven't," gasped poor Anne. Oh, how could she explain?
She COULDN'T explain. There are some things that cannot be
explained.
"I did think I cared--truly I did--but I know now I don't."
"You have ruined my life," said Roy bitterly.
"Forgive me," pleaded Anne miserably, with hot cheeks and stinging eyes.
Roy turned away and stood for a few minutes looking out seaward.
When he came back to Anne, he was very pale again.
"You can give me no hope?" he said. Anne shook her head mutely.
"Then--good-bye," said Roy.
"I can't understand it--I can't believe you are not the woman I've believed you to be.
But reproaches are idle between us. You are the only woman I can ever love.
I thank you for your friendship, at least.
Good-bye, Anne." "Good-bye," faltered Anne.
When Roy had gone she sat for a long time in the pavilion, watching a white mist
creeping subtly and remorselessly landward up the harbor.
It was her hour of humiliation and self- contempt and shame.
Their waves went over her. And yet, underneath it all, was a ***
sense of recovered freedom.
She slipped into Patty's Place in the dusk and escaped to her room.
But Phil was there on the window seat. "Wait," said Anne, flushing to anticipate
the scene.
"Wait til you hear what I have to say. Phil, Roy asked me to marry him-and I
refused." "You--you REFUSED him?" said Phil blankly.
"Anne Shirley, are you in your senses?" "I think so," said Anne wearily.
"Oh, Phil, don't scold me. You don't understand."
"I certainly don't understand.
You've encouraged Roy Gardner in every way for two years--and now you tell me you've
refused him. Then you've just been flirting scandalously
with him.
Anne, I couldn't have believed it of YOU." "I WASN'T flirting with him--I honestly
thought I cared up to the last minute--and then--well, I just knew I NEVER could marry
him."
"I suppose," said Phil cruelly, "that you intended to marry him for his money, and
then your better self rose up and prevented you."
"I DIDN'T.
I never thought about his money. Oh, I can't explain it to you any more than
I could to him." "Well, I certainly think you have treated
Roy shamefully," said Phil in exasperation.
"He's handsome and clever and rich and good.
What more do you want?" "I want some one who BELONGS in my life.
He doesn't.
I was swept off my feet at first by his good looks and knack of paying romantic
compliments; and later on I thought I MUST be in love because he was my dark-eyed
ideal."
"I am bad enough for not knowing my own mind, but you are worse," said Phil.
"I DO know my own mind," protested Anne.
"The trouble is, my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over
again." "Well, I suppose there is no use in saying
anything to you."
"There is no need, Phil. I'm in the dust.
This has spoiled everything backwards. I can never think of Redmond days without
recalling the humiliation of this evening.
Roy despises me--and you despise me--and I despise myself."
"You poor darling," said Phil, melting. "Just come here and let me comfort you.
I've no right to scold you.
I'd have married Alec or Alonzo if I hadn't met Jo.
Oh, Anne, things are so mixed-up in real life.
They aren't clear-cut and trimmed off, as they are in novels."
"I hope that NO one will ever again ask me to marry him as long as I live," sobbed
poor Anne, devoutly believing that she meant it.
>
CHAPTER XXXIX Deals with Weddings
Anne felt that life partook of the nature of an anticlimax during the first few weeks
after her return to Green Gables. She missed the merry comradeship of Patty's
Place.
She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in
the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she
could not immediately begin dreaming again.
And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without
them has few charms.
She had not seen Roy again after their painful parting in the park pavilion; but
Dorothy came to see her before she left Kingsport.
"I'm awfully sorry you won't marry Roy," she said.
"I did want you for a sister. But you are quite right.
He would bore you to death.
I love him, and he is a dear sweet boy, but really he isn't a bit interesting.
He looks as if he ought to be, but he isn't."
"This won't spoil OUR friendship, will it, Dorothy?"
Anne had asked wistfully. "No, indeed.
You're too good to lose.
If I can't have you for a sister I mean to keep you as a chum anyway.
And don't fret over Roy.
He is feeling terribly just now--I have to listen to his outpourings every day--but
he'll get over it. He always does."
"Oh--ALWAYS?" said Anne with a slight change of voice.
"So he has 'got over it' before?" "Dear me, yes," said Dorothy frankly.
"Twice before.
And he raved to me just the same both times.
Not that the others actually refused him-- they simply announced their engagements to
some one else.
Of course, when he met you he vowed to me that he had never really loved before--that
the previous affairs had been merely boyish fancies.
But I don't think you need worry."
Anne decided not to worry. Her feelings were a mixture of relief and
resentment. Roy had certainly told her she was the only
one he had ever loved.
No doubt he believed it. But it was a comfort to feel that she had
not, in all likelihood, ruined his life.
There were other goddesses, and Roy, according to Dorothy, must needs be
worshipping at some shrine.
Nevertheless, life was stripped of several more illusions, and Anne began to think
drearily that it seemed rather bare.
She came down from the porch gable on the evening of her return with a sorrowful
face. "What has happened to the old Snow Queen,
Marilla?"
"Oh, I knew you'd feel bad over that," said Marilla.
"I felt bad myself. That tree was there ever since I was a
young girl.
It blew down in the big gale we had in March.
It was rotten at the core." "I'll miss it so," grieved Anne.
"The porch gable doesn't seem the same room without it.
I'll never look from its window again without a sense of loss.
And oh, I never came home to Green Gables before that Diana wasn't here to welcome
me." "Diana has something else to think of just
now," said Mrs. Lynde significantly.
"Well, tell me all the Avonlea news," said Anne, sitting down on the porch steps,
where the evening sunshine fell over her hair in a fine golden rain.
"There isn't much news except what we've wrote you," said Mrs. Lynde.
"I suppose you haven't heard that Simon Fletcher broke his leg last week.
It's a great thing for his family.
They're getting a hundred things done that they've always wanted to do but couldn't as
long as he was about, the old crank." "He came of an aggravating family,"
remarked Marilla.
"Aggravating? Well, rather!
His mother used to get up in prayer-meeting and tell all her children's shortcomings
and ask prayers for them.
'Course it made them mad, and worse than ever."
"You haven't told Anne the news about Jane," suggested Marilla.
"Oh, Jane," sniffed Mrs. Lynde.
"Well," she conceded grudgingly, "Jane Andrews is home from the West--came last
week--and she's going to be married to a Winnipeg millionaire.
You may be sure Mrs. Harmon lost no time in telling it far and wide."
"Dear old Jane--I'm so glad," said Anne heartily.
"She deserves the good things of life."
"Oh, I ain't saying anything against Jane. She's a nice enough girl.
But she isn't in the millionaire class, and you'll find there's not much to recommend
that man but his money, that's what.
Mrs. Harmon says he's an Englishman who has made money in mines but I believe he'll
turn out to be a Yankee. He certainly must have money, for he has
just showered Jane with jewelry.
Her engagement ring is a diamond cluster so big that it looks like a plaster on Jane's
fat paw." Mrs. Lynde could not keep some bitterness
out of her tone.
Here was Jane Andrews, that plain little plodder, engaged to a millionaire, while
Anne, it seemed, was not yet bespoken by any one, rich or poor.
And Mrs. Harmon Andrews did brag insufferably.
"What has Gilbert Blythe been doing to at college?" asked Marilla.
"I saw him when he came home last week, and he is so pale and thin I hardly knew him."
"He studied very hard last winter," said Anne.
"You know he took High Honors in Classics and the Cooper Prize.
It hasn't been taken for five years! So I think he's rather run down.
We're all a little tired."
"Anyhow, you're a B.A. and Jane Andrews isn't and never will be," said Mrs. Lynde,
with gloomy satisfaction.
A few evenings later Anne went down to see Jane, but the latter was away in
Charlottetown--"getting sewing done," Mrs. Harmon informed Anne proudly.
"Of course an Avonlea dressmaker wouldn't do for Jane under the circumstances."
"I've heard something very nice about Jane," said Anne.
"Yes, Jane has done pretty well, even if she isn't a B.A.," said Mrs. Harmon, with a
slight toss of her head. "Mr. Inglis is worth millions, and they're
going to Europe on their wedding tour.
When they come back they'll live in a perfect mansion of marble in Winnipeg.
Jane has only one trouble--she can cook so well and her husband won't let her cook.
He is so rich he hires his cooking done.
They're going to keep a cook and two other maids and a coachman and a man-of-all-work.
But what about YOU, Anne? I don't hear anything of your being
married, after all your college-going."
"Oh," laughed Anne, "I am going to be an old maid.
I really can't find any one to suit me." It was rather wicked of her.
She deliberately meant to remind Mrs. Andrews that if she became an old maid it
was not because she had not had at least one chance of marriage.
But Mrs. Harmon took swift revenge.
"Well, the over-particular girls generally get left, I notice.
And what's this I hear about Gilbert Blythe being engaged to a Miss Stuart?
Charlie Sloane tells me she is perfectly beautiful.
Is it true?"
"I don't know if it is true that he is engaged to Miss Stuart," replied Anne, with
Spartan composure, "but it is certainly true that she is very lovely."
"I once thought you and Gilbert would have made a match of it," said Mrs. Harmon.
"If you don't take care, Anne, all of your beaux will slip through your fingers."
Anne decided not to continue her duel with Mrs. Harmon.
You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.
"Since Jane is away," she said, rising haughtily, "I don't think I can stay longer
this morning. I'll come down when she comes home."
"Do," said Mrs. Harmon effusively.
"Jane isn't a bit proud. She just means to associate with her old
friends the same as ever. She'll be real glad to see you."
Jane's millionaire arrived the last of May and carried her off in a blaze of splendor.
Mrs. Lynde was spitefully gratified to find that Mr. Inglis was every day of forty, and
short and thin and grayish.
Mrs. Lynde did not spare him in her enumeration of his shortcomings, you may be
sure.
"It will take all his gold to gild a pill like him, that's what," said Mrs. Rachel
solemnly.
"He looks kind and good-hearted," said Anne loyally, "and I'm sure he thinks the world
of Jane." "Humph!" said Mrs. Rachel.
Phil Gordon was married the next week and Anne went over to Bolingbroke to be her
bridesmaid.
Phil made a dainty fairy of a bride, and the Rev. Jo was so radiant in his happiness
that nobody thought him plain.
"We're going for a lovers' saunter through the land of Evangeline," said Phil, "and
then we'll settle down on Patterson Street.
Mother thinks it is terrible--she thinks Jo might at least take a church in a decent
place.
But the wilderness of the Patterson slums will blossom like the rose for me if Jo is
there. Oh, Anne, I'm so happy my heart aches with
it."
Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little
lonely to be surrounded everywhere by a happiness that is not your own.
And it was just the same when she went back to Avonlea.
This time it was Diana who was bathed in the wonderful glory that comes to a woman
when her first-born is laid beside her.
Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into
her feelings for Diana before.
Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-
cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays?
It gave her a *** desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those
past years and had no business in the present at all.
"Isn't he perfectly beautiful?" said Diana proudly.
The little fat fellow was absurdly like Fred--just as round, just as red.
Anne really could not say conscientiously that she thought him beautiful, but she
vowed sincerely that he was sweet and kissable and altogether delightful.
"Before he came I wanted a girl, so that I could call her ANNE," said Diana.
"But now that little Fred is here I wouldn't exchange him for a million girls.
He just COULDN'T have been anything but his own precious self."
"'Every little baby is the sweetest and the best,'" quoted Mrs. Allan gaily.
"If little Anne HAD come you'd have felt just the same about her."
Mrs. Allan was visiting in Avonlea, for the first time since leaving it.
She was as gay and sweet and sympathetic as ever.
Her old girl friends had welcomed her back rapturously.
The reigning minister's wife was an estimable lady, but she was not exactly a
kindred spirit. "I can hardly wait till he gets old enough
to talk," sighed Diana.
"I just long to hear him say 'mother.' And oh, I'm determined that his first
memory of me shall be a nice one. The first memory I have of my mother is of
her slapping me for something I had done.
I am sure I deserved it, and mother was always a good mother and I love her dearly.
But I do wish my first memory of her was nicer."
"I have just one memory of my mother and it is the sweetest of all my memories," said
Mrs. Allan.
"I was five years old, and I had been allowed to go to school one day with my two
older sisters.
When school came out my sisters went home in different groups, each supposing I was
with the other. Instead I had run off with a little girl I
had played with at recess.
We went to her home, which was near the school, and began making mud pies.
We were having a glorious time when my older sister arrived, breathless and angry.
"'You naughty girl" she cried, snatching my reluctant hand and dragging me along with
her. 'Come home this minute.
Oh, you're going to catch it!
Mother is awful cross. She is going to give you a good whipping.'
"I had never been whipped. Dread and terror filled my poor little
heart.
I have never been so miserable in my life as I was on that walk home.
I had not meant to be naughty. Phemy Cameron had asked me to go home with
her and I had not known it was wrong to go.
And now I was to be whipped for it. When we got home my sister dragged me into
the kitchen where mother was sitting by the fire in the twilight.
My poor wee legs were trembling so that I could hardly stand.
And mother--mother just took me up in her arms, without one word of rebuke or
harshness, kissed me and held me close to her heart.
'I was so frightened you were lost, darling,' she said tenderly.
I could see the love shining in her eyes as she looked down on me.
She never scolded or reproached me for what I had done--only told me I must never go
away again without asking permission. She died very soon afterwards.
That is the only memory I have of her.
Isn't it a beautiful one?" Anne felt lonelier than ever as she walked
home, going by way of the Birch Path and Willowmere.
She had not walked that way for many moons.
It was a darkly-purple bloomy night. The air was heavy with blossom fragrance--
almost too heavy. The cloyed senses recoiled from it as from
an overfull cup.
The birches of the path had grown from the fairy saplings of old to big trees.
Everything had changed.
Anne felt that she would be glad when the summer was over and she was away at work
again. Perhaps life would not seem so empty then.
"'I've tried the world--it wears no more
The coloring of romance it wore,'" sighed Anne--and was straightway much comforted by
the romance in the idea of the world being denuded of romance!
>
CHAPTER XL A Book of Revelation
The Irvings came back to Echo Lodge for the summer, and Anne spent a happy three weeks
there in July.
Miss Lavendar had not changed; Charlotta the Fourth was a very grown-up young lady
now, but still adored Anne sincerely.
"When all's said and done, Miss Shirley, ma'am, I haven't seen any one in Boston
that's equal to you," she said frankly. Paul was almost grown up, too.
He was sixteen, his chestnut curls had given place to close-cropped brown locks,
and he was more interested in football than fairies.
But the bond between him and his old teacher still held.
Kindred spirits alone do not change with changing years.
It was a wet, bleak, cruel evening in July when Anne came back to Green Gables.
One of the fierce summer storms which sometimes sweep over the gulf was ravaging
the sea.
As Anne came in the first raindrops dashed against the panes.
"Was that Paul who brought you home?" asked Marilla.
"Why didn't you make him stay all night.
It's going to be a wild evening." "He'll reach Echo Lodge before the rain
gets very heavy, I think. Anyway, he wanted to go back tonight.
Well, I've had a splendid visit, but I'm glad to see you dear folks again.
'East, west, hame's best.' Davy, have you been growing again lately?"
"I've growed a whole inch since you left," said Davy proudly.
"I'm as tall as Milty Boulter now. Ain't I glad.
He'll have to stop crowing about being bigger.
Say, Anne, did you know that Gilbert Blythe is dying?"
Anne stood quite silent and motionless, looking at Davy.
Her face had gone so white that Marilla thought she was going to faint.
"Davy, hold your tongue," said Mrs. Rachel angrily.
"Anne, don't look like that--DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT!
We didn't mean to tell you so suddenly."
"Is--it--true?" asked Anne in a voice that was not hers.
"Gilbert is very ill," said Mrs. Lynde gravely.
"He took down with typhoid fever just after you left for Echo Lodge.
Did you never hear of it?" "No," said that unknown voice.
"It was a very bad case from the start.
The doctor said he'd been terribly run down.
They've a trained nurse and everything's been done.
DON'T look like that, Anne.
While there's life there's hope." "Mr. Harrison was here this evening and he
said they had no hope of him," reiterated Davy.
Marilla, looking old and worn and tired, got up and marched Davy grimly out of the
kitchen.
"Oh, DON'T look so, dear," said Mrs. Rachel, putting her kind old arms about the
pallid girl. "I haven't given up hope, indeed I haven't.
He's got the Blythe constitution in his favor, that's what."
Anne gently put Mrs. Lynde's arms away from her, walked blindly across the kitchen,
through the hall, up the stairs to her old room.
At its window she knelt down, staring out unseeingly.
It was very dark. The rain was beating down over the
shivering fields.
The Haunted Woods was full of the groans of mighty trees wrung in the tempest, and the
air throbbed with the thunderous crash of billows on the distant shore.
And Gilbert was dying!
There is a book of Revelation in every one's life, as there is in the Bible.
Anne read hers that bitter night, as she kept her agonized vigil through the hours
of storm and darkness.
She loved Gilbert--had always loved him! She knew that now.
She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she
could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her.
And the knowledge had come too late--too late even for the bitter solace of being
with him at the last.
If she had not been so blind--so foolish-- she would have had the right to go to him
now.
But he would never know that she loved him- -he would go away from this life thinking
that she did not care. Oh, the black years of emptiness stretching
before her!
She could not live through them--she could not!
She cowered down by her window and wished, for the first time in her gay young life,
that she could die, too.
If Gilbert went away from her, without one word or sign or message, she could not
live. Nothing was of any value without him.
She belonged to him and he to her.
In her hour of supreme agony she had no doubt of that.
He did not love Christine Stuart--never had loved Christine Stuart.
Oh, what a fool she had been not to realize what the bond was that had held her to
Gilbert--to think that the flattered fancy she had felt for Roy Gardner had been love.
And now she must pay for her folly as for a crime.
Mrs. Lynde and Marilla crept to her door before they went to bed, shook their heads
doubtfully at each other over the silence, and went away.
The storm raged all night, but when the dawn came it was spent.
Anne saw a fairy fringe of light on the skirts of darkness.
Soon the eastern hilltops had a fire-shot ruby rim.
The clouds rolled themselves away into great, soft, white masses on the horizon;
the sky gleamed blue and silvery.
A hush fell over the world. Anne rose from her knees and crept
downstairs.
The freshness of the rain-wind blew against her white face as she went out into the
yard, and cooled her dry, burning eyes. A merry rollicking whistle was lilting up
the lane.
A moment later Pacifique Buote came in sight.
Anne's physical strength suddenly failed her.
If she had not clutched at a low willow bough she would have fallen.
Pacifique was George Fletcher's hired man, and George Fletcher lived next door to the
Blythes.
Mrs. Fletcher was Gilbert's aunt. Pacifique would know if--if--Pacifique
would know what there was to be known. Pacifique strode sturdily on along the red
lane, whistling.
He did not see Anne. She made three futile attempts to call him.
He was almost past before she succeeded in making her quivering lips call,
"Pacifique!"
Pacifique turned with a grin and a cheerful good morning.
"Pacifique," said Anne faintly, "did you come from George Fletcher's this morning?"
"Sure," said Pacifique amiably.
"I got de word las' night dat my fader, he was seeck.
It was so stormy dat I couldn't go den, so I start vair early dis mornin'.
I'm goin' troo de woods for short cut."
"Did you hear how Gilbert Blythe was this morning?"
Anne's desperation drove her to the question.
Even the worst would be more endurable than this hideous suspense.
"He's better," said Pacifique. "He got de turn las' night.
De doctor say he'll be all right now dis soon while.
Had close shave, dough! Dat boy, he jus' keel himself at college.
Well, I mus' hurry.
De old man, he'll be in hurry to see me." Pacifique resumed his walk and his whistle.
Anne gazed after him with eyes where joy was driving out the strained anguish of the
night.
He was a very lank, very ragged, very homely youth.
But in her sight he was as beautiful as those who bring good tidings on the
mountains.
Never, as long as she lived, would Anne see Pacifique's brown, round, black-eyed face
without a warm remembrance of the moment when he had given to her the oil of joy for
mourning.
Long after Pacifique's gay whistle had faded into the phantom of music and then
into silence far up under the maples of Lover's Lane Anne stood under the willows,
tasting the poignant sweetness of life when some great dread has been removed from it.
The morning was a cup filled with mist and glamor.
In the corner near her was a rich surprise of new-blown, crystal-dewed roses.
The trills and trickles of song from the birds in the big tree above her seemed in
perfect accord with her mood.
A sentence from a very old, very true, very wonderful Book came to her lips,
"Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning."
>
CHAPTER XLI Love Takes Up the Glass of Time
"I've come up to ask you to go for one of our old-time rambles through September
woods and 'over hills where spices grow,' this afternoon," said Gilbert, coming
suddenly around the porch corner.
"Suppose we visit Hester Gray's garden." Anne, sitting on the stone step with her
lap full of a pale, filmy, green stuff, looked up rather blankly.
"Oh, I wish I could," she said slowly, "but I really can't, Gilbert.
I'm going to Alice Penhallow's wedding this evening, you know.
I've got to do something to this dress, and by the time it's finished I'll have to get
ready. I'm so sorry.
I'd love to go."
"Well, can you go tomorrow afternoon, then?" asked Gilbert, apparently not much
disappointed. "Yes, I think so."
"In that case I shall hie me home at once to do something I should otherwise have to
do tomorrow. So Alice Penhallow is to be married
tonight.
Three weddings for you in one summer, Anne- -Phil's, Alice's, and Jane's.
I'll never forgive Jane for not inviting me to her wedding."
"You really can't blame her when you think of the tremendous Andrews connection who
had to be invited. The house could hardly hold them all.
I was only bidden by grace of being Jane's old chum--at least on Jane's part.
I think Mrs. Harmon's motive for inviting me was to let me see Jane's surpassing
gorgeousness."
"Is it true that she wore so many diamonds that you couldn't tell where the diamonds
left off and Jane began?" Anne laughed.
"She certainly wore a good many.
What with all the diamonds and white satin and tulle and lace and roses and orange
blossoms, prim little Jane was almost lost to sight.
But she was VERY happy, and so was Mr. Inglis--and so was Mrs. Harmon."
"Is that the dress you're going to wear tonight?" asked Gilbert, looking down at
the fluffs and frills.
"Yes. Isn't it pretty?
And I shall wear starflowers in my hair. The Haunted Wood is full of them this
summer."
Gilbert had a sudden vision of Anne, arrayed in a frilly green gown, with the
virginal curves of arms and throat slipping out of it, and white stars shining against
the coils of her ruddy hair.
The vision made him catch his breath. But he turned lightly away.
"Well, I'll be up tomorrow. Hope you'll have a nice time tonight."
Anne looked after him as he strode away, and sighed.
Gilbert was friendly--very friendly--far too friendly.
He had come quite often to Green Gables after his recovery, and something of their
old comradeship had returned. But Anne no longer found it satisfying.
The rose of love made the blossom of friendship pale and scentless by contrast.
And Anne had again begun to doubt if Gilbert now felt anything for her but
friendship.
In the common light of common day her radiant certainty of that rapt morning had
faded. She was haunted by a miserable fear that
her mistake could never be rectified.
It was quite likely that it was Christine whom Gilbert loved after all.
Perhaps he was even engaged to her.
Anne tried to put all unsettling hopes out of her heart, and reconcile herself to a
future where work and ambition must take the place of love.
She could do good, if not noble, work as a teacher; and the success her little
sketches were beginning to meet with in certain editorial sanctums augured well for
her budding literary dreams.
But--but--Anne picked up her green dress and sighed again.
When Gilbert came the next afternoon he found Anne waiting for him, fresh as the
dawn and fair as a star, after all the gaiety of the preceding night.
She wore a green dress--not the one she had worn to the wedding, but an old one which
Gilbert had told her at a Redmond reception he liked especially.
It was just the shade of green that brought out the rich tints of her hair, and the
starry gray of her eyes and the iris-like delicacy of her skin.
Gilbert, glancing at her sideways as they walked along a shadowy woodpath, thought
she had never looked so lovely.
Anne, glancing sideways at Gilbert, now and then, thought how much older he looked
since his illness. It was as if he had put boyhood behind him
forever.
The day was beautiful and the way was beautiful.
Anne was almost sorry when they reached Hester Gray's garden, and sat down on the
old bench.
But it was beautiful there, too--as beautiful as it had been on the faraway day
of the Golden Picnic, when Diana and Jane and Priscilla and she had found it.
Then it had been lovely with narcissus and violets; now golden rod had kindled its
fairy torches in the corners and asters dotted it bluely.
The call of the brook came up through the woods from the valley of birches with all
its old allurement; the mellow air was full of the purr of the sea; beyond were fields
rimmed by fences bleached silvery gray in
the suns of many summers, and long hills scarfed with the shadows of autumnal
clouds; with the blowing of the west wind old dreams returned.
"I think," said Anne softly, "that 'the land where dreams come true' is in the blue
haze yonder, over that little valley." "Have you any unfulfilled dreams, Anne?"
asked Gilbert.
Something in his tone--something she had not heard since that miserable evening in
the orchard at Patty's Place--made Anne's heart beat wildly.
But she made answer lightly.
"Of course. Everybody has.
It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled.
We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.
What a delicious aroma that low-descending sun is extracting from the asters and
ferns.
I wish we could see perfumes as well as smell them.
I'm sure they would be very beautiful." Gilbert was not to be thus sidetracked.
"I have a dream," he said slowly.
"I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come
true.
I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends--
and YOU!" Anne wanted to speak but she could find no
words.
Happiness was breaking over her like a wave.
It almost frightened her. "I asked you a question over two years ago,
Anne.
If I ask it again today will you give me a different answer?"
Still Anne could not speak.
But she lifted her eyes, shining with all the love-rapture of countless generations,
and looked into his for a moment. He wanted no other answer.
They lingered in the old garden until twilight, sweet as dusk in Eden must have
been, crept over it.
There was so much to talk over and recall-- things said and done and heard and thought
and felt and misunderstood.
"I thought you loved Christine Stuart," Anne told him, as reproachfully as if she
had not given him every reason to suppose that she loved Roy Gardner.
Gilbert laughed boyishly.
"Christine was engaged to somebody in her home town.
I knew it and she knew I knew it.
When her brother graduated he told me his sister was coming to Kingsport the next
winter to take music, and asked me if I would look after her a bit, as she knew no
one and would be very lonely.
So I did. And then I liked Christine for her own
sake. She is one of the nicest girls I've ever
known.
I knew college gossip credited us with being in love with each other.
I didn't care.
Nothing mattered much to me for a time there, after you told me you could never
love me, Anne. There was nobody else--there never could be
anybody else for me but you.
I've loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school."
"I don't see how you could keep on loving me when I was such a little fool," said
Anne.
"Well, I tried to stop," said Gilbert frankly, "not because I thought you what
you call yourself, but because I felt sure there was no chance for me after Gardner
came on the scene.
But I couldn't--and I can't tell you, either, what it's meant to me these two
years to believe you were going to marry him, and be told every week by some
busybody that your engagement was on the point of being announced.
I believed it until one blessed day when I was sitting up after the fever.
I got a letter from Phil Gordon--Phil Blake, rather--in which she told me there
was really nothing between you and Roy, and advised me to 'try again.'
Well, the doctor was amazed at my rapid recovery after that."
Anne laughed--then shivered. "I can never forget the night I thought you
were dying, Gilbert.
Oh, I knew--I KNEW then--and I thought it was too late."
"But it wasn't, sweetheart. Oh, Anne, this makes up for everything,
doesn't it?
Let's resolve to keep this day sacred to perfect beauty all our lives for the gift
it has given us." "It's the birthday of our happiness," said
Anne softly.
"I've always loved this old garden of Hester Gray's, and now it will be dearer
than ever." "But I'll have to ask you to wait a long
time, Anne," said Gilbert sadly.
"It will be three years before I'll finish my medical course.
And even then there will be no diamond sunbursts and marble halls."
Anne laughed.
"I don't want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want YOU.
You see I'm quite as shameless as Phil about it.
Sunbursts and marble halls may be all very well, but there is more 'scope for
imagination' without them. And as for the waiting, that doesn't
matter.
We'll just be happy, waiting and working for each other--and dreaming.
Oh, dreams will be very sweet now." Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed
her.
Then they walked home together in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm
of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and
over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew.
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