Chapter X: Part 10

Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed. Public opinion never agreed on Anne’s looks. People who had heard her called handsome met her and were disappointed. People who had heard her called plain saw her and wondered where other people’s eyes were. Anne herself would never believe that she had any claim to beauty. When she looked in the glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the nose thereof. Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive, ever-varying play of feeling that came and went over her features like a rosy illuminating flame, or the charm of dream and laughter alternating in her big eyes.

While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities. Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her. . . the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.

As they picked, Charlotta the Fourth confided to Anne her fears regarding Miss Lavendar. The warm-hearted little handmaiden was honestly worried over her adored mistress’ condition.

“Miss Lavendar isn’t well, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I’m sure she isn’t, though she never complains. She hasn’t seemed like herself this long while, ma’am . . . not since that day you and Paul were here together before. I feel sure she caught cold that night, ma’am. After you and him had gone she went out and walked in the garden for long after dark with nothing but a little shawl on her. There was a lot of snow on the walks and I feel sure she got a chill, ma’am. Ever since then I’ve noticed her acting tired and lonesome like. She don’t seem to take an interest in anything, ma’am. She never pretends company’s coming, nor fixes up for it, nor nothing, ma’am. It’s only when you come she seems to chirk up a bit. And the worst sign of all, Miss Shirley, ma’am . . .” Charlotta the Fourth lowered her voice as if she were about to tell some exceedingly weird and awful symptom indeed . . . “is that she never gets cross now when I breaks things. Why, Miss Shirley, ma’am, yesterday I bruk her green and yaller bowl that’s always stood on the bookcase. Her grandmother brought it out from England and Miss Lavendar was awful choice of it. I was dusting it just as careful, Miss Shirley, ma’am, and it slipped out, so fashion, afore I could grab holt of it, and bruk into about forty millyun pieces. I tell you I was sorry and scared. I thought Miss Lavendar would scold me awful, ma’am; and I’d ruther she had than take it the way she did. She just come in and hardly looked at it and said, ‘It’s no matter, Charlotta. Take up the pieces and throw them away.’ Just like that, Miss Shirley, ma’am . . . ‘take up the pieces and throw them away,’ as if it wasn’t her grandmother’s bowl from England. Oh, she isn’t well and I feel awful bad about it. She’s got nobody to look after her but me.”

Charlotta the Fourth’s eyes brimmed up with tears. Anne patted the little brown paw holding the cracked pink cup sympathetically.

“I think Miss Lavendar needs a change, Charlotta. She stays here alone too much. Can’t we induce her to go away for a little trip?”

Charlotta shook her head, with its rampant bows, disconsolately.

“I don’t think so, Miss Shirley, ma’am. Miss Lavendar hates visiting. She’s only got three relations she ever visits and she says she just goes to see them as a family duty. Last time when she come home she said she wasn’t going to visit for family duty no more. ‘I’ve come home in love with loneliness, Charlotta,’ she says to me, ‘and I never want to stray from my own vine and fig tree again. My relations try so hard to make an old lady of me and it has a bad effect on me.’ Just like that, Miss Shirley, ma’am. ‘It has a very bad effect on me.’ So I don’t think it would do any good to coax her to go visiting.”

“We must see what can be done,” said Anne decidedly, as she put the last possible berry in her pink cup. “Just as soon as I have my vacation I’ll come through and spend a whole week with you. We’ll have a picnic every day and pretend all sorts of interesting things, and see if we can’t cheer Miss Lavendar up.”

“That will be the very thing, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” exclaimed Charlotta the Fourth in rapture. She was glad for Miss Lavendar’s sake and for her own too. With a whole week in which to study Anne constantly she would surely be able to learn how to move and behave like her.

When the girls got back to Echo Lodge they found that Miss Lavendar and Paul had carried the little square table out of the kitchen to the garden and had everything ready for tea. Nothing ever tasted so delicious as those strawberries and cream, eaten under a great blue sky all curdled over with fluffy little white clouds, and in the long shadows of the wood with its lispings and its murmurings. After tea Anne helped Charlotta wash the dishes in the kitchen, while Miss Lavendar sat on the stone bench with Paul and heard all about his rock people. She was a good listener, this sweet Miss Lavendar, but just at the last it struck Paul that she had suddenly lost interest in the Twin Sailors.

“Miss Lavendar, why do you look at me like that?” he asked gravely.

“How do I look, Paul?”

“Just as if you were looking through me at somebody I put you in mind of,” said Paul, who had such occasional flashes of uncanny insight that it wasn’t quite safe to have secrets when he was about.

“You do put me in mind of somebody I knew long ago,” said Miss Lavendar dreamily.

“When you were young?”

“Yes, when I was young. Do I seem very old to you, Paul?”

“Do you know, I can’t make up my mind about that,” said Paul confidentially. “Your hair looks old . . . I never knew a young person with white hair. But your eyes are as young as my beautiful teacher’s when you laugh. I tell you what, Miss Lavendar” . . . Paul’s voice and face were as solemn as a judge’s . . . “I think you would make a splendid mother. You have just the right look in your eyes . . . the look my little mother always had. I think it’s a pity you haven’t any boys of your own.”

“I have a little dream boy, Paul.”

“Oh, have you really? How old is he?”

“About your age I think. He ought to be older because I dreamed him long before you were born. But I’ll never let him get any older than eleven or twelve; because if I did some day he might grow up altogether and then I’d lose him.”

“I know,” nodded Paul. “That’s the beauty of dream-people . . . they stay any age you want them. You and my beautiful teacher and me myself are the only folks in the world that I know of that have dream-people. Isn’t it funny and nice we should all know each other? But I guess that kind of people always find each other out. Grandma never has dream-people and Mary Joe thinks I’m wrong in the upper story because I have them. But I think it’s splendid to have them. _You_ know, Miss Lavendar. Tell me all about your little dream-boy.”

“He has blue eyes and curly hair. He steals in and wakens me with a kiss every morning. Then all day he plays here in the garden . . . and I play with him. Such games as we have. We run races and talk with the echoes; and I tell him stories. And when twilight comes . . .”

“_I_ know,” interrupted Paul eagerly. “He comes and sits beside you . . . _so_ . . . because of course at twelve he’d be too big to climb into your lap . . . and lays his head on your shoulder . . . _so_ . . . and you put your arms about him and hold him tight, tight, and rest your cheek on his head . . . yes, that’s the very way. Oh, you _do_ know, Miss Lavendar.”

Anne found the two of them there when she came out of the stone house, and something in Miss Lavendar’s face made her hate to disturb them.

“I’m afraid we must go, Paul, if we want to get home before dark. Miss Lavendar, I’m going to invite myself to Echo Lodge for a whole week pretty soon.”

“If you come for a week I’ll keep you for two,” threatened Miss Lavendar.

XXVIII The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace

The last day of school came and went. A triumphant “semi-annual examination” was held and Anne’s pupils acquitted themselves splendidly. At the close they gave her an address and a writing desk. All the girls and ladies present cried, and some of the boys had it cast up to them later on that they cried too, although they always denied it.

Mrs. Harmon Andrews, Mrs. Peter Sloane, and Mrs. William Bell walked home together and talked things over.

“I do think it is such a pity Anne is leaving when the children seem so much attached to her,” sighed Mrs. Peter Sloane, who had a habit of sighing over everything and even finished off her jokes that way. “To be sure,” she added hastily, “we all know we’ll have a good teacher next year too.”

“Jane will do her duty, I’ve no doubt,” said Mrs. Andrews rather stiffly. “I don’t suppose she’ll tell the children quite so many fairy tales or spend so much time roaming about the woods with them. But she has her name on the Inspector’s Roll of Honor and the Newbridge people are in a terrible state over her leaving.”

“I’m real glad Anne is going to college,” said Mrs. Bell. “She has always wanted it and it will be a splendid thing for her.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Mrs. Andrews was determined not to agree fully with anybody that day. “I don’t see that Anne needs any more education. She’ll probably be marrying Gilbert Blythe, if his infatuation for her lasts till he gets through college, and what good will Latin and Greek do her then? If they taught you at college how to manage a man there might be some sense in her going.”

Mrs. Harmon Andrews, so Avonlea gossip whispered, had never learned how to manage her “man,” and as a result the Andrews household was not exactly a model of domestic happiness.

“I see that the Charlottetown call to Mr. Allan is up before the Presbytery,” said Mrs. Bell. “That means we’ll be losing him soon, I suppose.”

“They’re not going before September,” said Mrs. Sloane. “It will be a great loss to the community . . . though I always did think that Mrs. Allan dressed rather too gay for a minister’s wife. But we are none of us perfect. Did you notice how neat and snug Mr. Harrison looked today? I never saw such a changed man. He goes to church every Sunday and has subscribed to the salary.”

“Hasn’t that Paul Irving grown to be a big boy?” said Mrs. Andrews. “He was such a mite for his age when he came here. I declare I hardly knew him today. He’s getting to look a lot like his father.”

“He’s a smart boy,” said Mrs. Bell.

“He’s smart enough, but” . . . Mrs. Andrews lowered her voice . . . “I believe he tells queer stories. Gracie came home from school one day last week with the greatest rigmarole he had told her about people who lived down at the shore . . . stories there couldn’t be a word of truth in, you know. I told Gracie not to believe them, and she said Paul didn’t intend her to. But if he didn’t what did he tell them to her for?”

“Anne says Paul is a genius,” said Mrs. Sloane.

“He may be. You never know what to expect of them Americans,” said Mrs. Andrews. Mrs. Andrews’ only acquaintance with the word “genius” was derived from the colloquial fashion of calling any eccentric individual “a queer genius.” She probably thought, with Mary Joe, that it meant a person with something wrong in his upper story.

Back in the schoolroom Anne was sitting alone at her desk, as she had sat on the first day of school two years before, her face leaning on her hand, her dewy eyes looking wistfully out of the window to the Lake of Shining Waters. Her heart was so wrung over the parting with her pupils that for a moment college had lost all its charm. She still felt the clasp of Annetta Bell’s arms about her neck and heard the childish wail, “I’ll _never_ love any teacher as much as you, Miss Shirley, never, never.”

For two years she had worked earnestly and faithfully, making many mistakes and learning from them. She had had her reward. She had taught her scholars something, but she felt that they had taught her much more . . . lessons of tenderness, self-control, innocent wisdom, lore of childish hearts. Perhaps she had not succeeded in “inspiring” any wonderful ambitions in her pupils, but she had taught them, more by her own sweet personality than by all her careful precepts, that it was good and necessary in the years that were before them to live their lives finely and graciously, holding fast to truth and courtesy and kindness, keeping aloof from all that savored of falsehood and meanness and vulgarity. They were, perhaps, all unconscious of having learned such lessons; but they would remember and practice them long after they had forgotten the capital of Afghanistan and the dates of the Wars of the Roses.

“Another chapter in my life is closed,” said Anne aloud, as she locked her desk. She really felt very sad over it; but the romance in the idea of that “closed chapter” did comfort her a little.

Anne spent a fortnight at Echo Lodge early in her vacation and everybody concerned had a good time.

She took Miss Lavendar on a shopping expedition to town and persuaded her to buy a new organdy dress; then came the excitement of cutting and making it together, while the happy Charlotta the Fourth basted and swept up clippings. Miss Lavendar had complained that she could not feel much interest in anything, but the sparkle came back to her eyes over her pretty dress.

“What a foolish, frivolous person I must be,” she sighed. “I’m wholesomely ashamed to think that a new dress . . . even it is a forget-me-not organdy . . . should exhilarate me so, when a good conscience and an extra contribution to Foreign Missions couldn’t do it.”

Midway in her visit Anne went home to Green Gables for a day to mend the twins’ stockings and settle up Davy’s accumulated store of questions. In the evening she went down to the shore road to see Paul Irving. As she passed by the low, square window of the Irving sitting room she caught a glimpse of Paul on somebody’s lap; but the next moment he came flying through the hall.

“Oh, Miss Shirley,” he cried excitedly, “you can’t think what has happened! Something so splendid. Father is here . . . just think of that! Father is here! Come right in. Father, this is my beautiful teacher. _You_ know, father.”

Stephen Irving came forward to meet Anne with a smile. He was a tall, handsome man of middle age, with iron-gray hair, deep-set, dark blue eyes, and a strong, sad face, splendidly modeled about chin and brow. Just the face for a hero of romance, Anne thought with a thrill of intense satisfaction. It was so disappointing to meet someone who ought to be a hero and find him bald or stooped, or otherwise lacking in manly beauty. Anne would have thought it dreadful if the object of Miss Lavendar’s romance had not looked the part.

“So this is my little son’s ‘beautiful teacher,’ of whom I have heard so much,” said Mr. Irving with a hearty handshake. “Paul’s letters have been so full of you, Miss Shirley, that I feel as if I were pretty well acquainted with you already. I want to thank you for what you have done for Paul. I think that your influence has been just what he needed. Mother is one of the best and dearest of women; but her robust, matter-of-fact Scotch common sense could not always understand a temperament like my laddie’s. What was lacking in her you have supplied. Between you, I think Paul’s training in these two past years has been as nearly ideal as a motherless boy’s could be.”

Everybody likes to be appreciated. Under Mr. Irving’s praise Anne’s face “burst flower like into rosy bloom,” and the busy, weary man of the world, looking at her, thought he had never seen a fairer, sweeter slip of girlhood than this little “down east” schoolteacher with her red hair and wonderful eyes.

Paul sat between them blissfully happy.

“I never dreamed father was coming,” he said radiantly. “Even Grandma didn’t know it. It was a great surprise. As a general thing . . .” Paul shook his brown curls gravely . . . “I don’t like to be surprised. You lose all the fun of expecting things when you’re surprised. But in a case like this it is all right. Father came last night after I had gone to bed. And after Grandma and Mary Joe had stopped being surprised he and Grandma came upstairs to look at me, not meaning to wake me up till morning. But I woke right up and saw father. I tell you I just sprang at him.”

“With a hug like a bear’s,” said Mr. Irving, putting his arms around Paul’s shoulder smilingly. “I hardly knew my boy, he had grown so big and brown and sturdy.”

“I don’t know which was the most pleased to see father, Grandma or I,” continued Paul. “Grandma’s been in kitchen all day making the things father likes to eat. She wouldn’t trust them to Mary Joe, she says. That’s _her_ way of showing gladness. _I_ like best just to sit and talk to father. But I’m going to leave you for a little while now if you’ll excuse me. I must get the cows for Mary Joe. That is one of my daily duties.”

When Paul had scampered away to do his “daily duty” Mr. Irving talked to Anne of various matters. But Anne felt that he was thinking of something else underneath all the time. Presently it came to the surface.

“In Paul’s last letter he spoke of going with you to visit an old . . . friend of mine . . . Miss Lewis at the stone house in Grafton. Do you know her well?”

“Yes, indeed, she is a _very_ dear friend of mine,” was Anne’s demure reply, which gave no hint of the sudden thrill that tingled over her from head to foot at Mr. Irving’s question. Anne “felt instinctively” that romance was peeping at her around a corner.

Mr. Irving rose and went to the window, looking out on a great, golden, billowing sea where a wild wind was harping. For a few moments there was silence in the little dark-walled room. Then he turned and looked down into Anne’s sympathetic face with a smile, half-whimsical, half-tender.

“I wonder how much you know,” he said.

“I know all about it,” replied Anne promptly. “You see,” she explained hastily, “Miss Lavendar and I are very intimate. She wouldn’t tell things of such a sacred nature to everybody. We are kindred spirits.”

“Yes, I believe you are. Well, I am going to ask a favor of you. I would like to go and see Miss Lavendar if she will let me. Will you ask her if I may come?”

Would she not? Oh, indeed she would! Yes, this was romance, the very, the real thing, with all the charm of rhyme and story and dream. It was a little belated, perhaps, like a rose blooming in October which should have bloomed in June; but none the less a rose, all sweetness and fragrance, with the gleam of gold in its heart. Never did Anne’s feet bear her on a more willing errand than on that walk through the beechwoods to Grafton the next morning. She found Miss Lavendar in the garden. Anne was fearfully excited. Her hands grew cold and her voice trembled.

“Miss Lavendar, I have something to tell you . . . something very important. Can you guess what it is?”

Anne never supposed that Miss Lavendar _could_ guess; but Miss Lavendar’s face grew very pale and Miss Lavendar said in a quiet, still voice, from which all the color and sparkle that Miss Lavendar’s voice usually suggested had faded.

“Stephen Irving is home?”

“How did you know? Who told you?” cried Anne disappointedly, vexed that her great revelation had been anticipated.

“Nobody. I knew that must be it, just from the way you spoke.”

“He wants to come and see you,” said Anne. “May I send him word that he may?”

“Yes, of course,” fluttered Miss Lavendar. “There is no reason why he shouldn’t. He is only coming as any old friend might.”

Anne had her own opinion about that as she hastened into the house to write a note at Miss Lavendar’s desk.

“Oh, it’s delightful to be living in a storybook,” she thought gaily. “It will come out all right of course . . . it must . . . and Paul will have a mother after his own heart and everybody will be happy. But Mr. Irving will take Miss Lavendar away . . . and dear knows what will happen to the little stone house . . . and so there are two sides to it, as there seems to be to everything in this world.” The important note was written and Anne herself carried it to the Grafton post office, where she waylaid the mail carrier and asked him to leave it at the Avonlea office.

“It’s so very important,” Anne assured him anxiously. The mail carrier was a rather grumpy old personage who did not at all look the part of a messenger of Cupid; and Anne was none too certain that his memory was to be trusted. But he said he would do his best to remember and she had to be contented with that.

Charlotta the Fourth felt that some mystery pervaded the stone house that afternoon . . . a mystery from which she was excluded. Miss Lavendar roamed about the garden in a distracted fashion. Anne, too, seemed possessed by a demon of unrest, and walked to and fro and went up and down. Charlotta the Fourth endured it till patience ceased to be a virtue; then she confronted Anne on the occasion of that romantic young person’s third aimless peregrination through the kitchen.

“Please, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” said Charlotta the Fourth, with an indignant toss of her very blue bows, “it’s plain to be seen you and Miss Lavendar have got a secret and I think, begging your pardon if I’m too forward, Miss Shirley, ma’am, that it’s real mean not to tell me when we’ve all been such chums.”

“Oh, Charlotta dear, I’d have told you all about it if it were my secret . . . but it’s Miss Lavendar’s, you see. However, I’ll tell you this much . . . and if nothing comes of it you must never breathe a word about it to a living soul. You see, Prince Charming is coming tonight. He came long ago, but in a foolish moment went away and wandered afar and forgot the secret of the magic pathway to the enchanted castle, where the princess was weeping her faithful heart out for him. But at last he remembered it again and the princess is waiting still. . . because nobody but her own dear prince could carry her off.”

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, what is that in prose?” gasped the mystified Charlotta.

Anne laughed.

“In prose, an old friend of Miss Lavendar’s is coming to see her tonight.”

“Do you mean an old beau of hers?” demanded the literal Charlotta.

“That is probably what I do mean . . . in prose,” answered Anne gravely. “It is Paul’s father . . . Stephen Irving. And goodness knows what will come of it, but let us hope for the best, Charlotta.”

“I hope that he’ll marry Miss Lavendar,” was Charlotta’s unequivocal response. “Some women’s intended from the start to be old maids, and I’m afraid I’m one of them, Miss Shirley, ma’am, because I’ve awful little patience with the men. But Miss Lavendar never was. And I’ve been awful worried, thinking what on earth she’d do when I got so big I’d _have_ to go to Boston. There ain’t any more girls in our family and dear knows what she’d do if she got some stranger that might laugh at her pretendings and leave things lying round out of their place and not be willing to be called Charlotta the Fifth. She might get someone who wouldn’t be as unlucky as me in breaking dishes but she’d never get anyone who’d love her better.”

And the faithful little handmaiden dashed to the oven door with a sniff.

They went through the form of having tea as usual that night at Echo Lodge; but nobody really ate anything. After tea Miss Lavendar went to her room and put on her new forget-me-not organdy, while Anne did her hair for her. Both were dreadfully excited; but Miss Lavendar pretended to be very calm and indifferent.

“I must really mend that rent in the curtain tomorrow,” she said anxiously, inspecting it as if it were the only thing of any importance just then. “Those curtains have not worn as well as they should, considering the price I paid. Dear me, Charlotta has forgotten to dust the stair railing _again_. I really _must_ speak to her about it.”

Anne was sitting on the porch steps when Stephen Irving came down the lane and across the garden.

“This is the one place where time stands still,” he said, looking around him with delighted eyes. “There is nothing changed about this house or garden since I was here twenty-five years ago. It makes me feel young again.”

“You know time always does stand still in an enchanted palace,” said Anne seriously. “It is only when the prince comes that things begin to happen.”

Mr. Irving smiled a little sadly into her uplifted face, all astar with its youth and promise.

“Sometimes the prince comes too late,” he said. He did not ask Anne to translate her remark into prose. Like all kindred spirits he “understood.”

“Oh, no, not if he is the real prince coming to the true princess,” said Anne, shaking her red head decidedly, as she opened the parlor door. When he had gone in she shut it tightly behind him and turned to confront Charlotta the Fourth, who was in the hall, all “nods and becks and wreathed smiles.”

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” she breathed, “I peeked from the kitchen window . . . and he’s awful handsome . . . and just the right age for Miss Lavendar. And oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, do you think it would be much harm to listen at the door?”

“It would be dreadful, Charlotta,” said Anne firmly, “so just you come away with me out of the reach of temptation.”

“I can’t do anything, and it’s awful to hang round just waiting,” sighed Charlotta. “What if he don’t propose after all, Miss Shirley, ma’am? You can never be sure of them men. My older sister, Charlotta the First, thought she was engaged to one once. But it turned out _he_ had a different opinion and she says she’ll never trust one of them again. And I heard of another case where a man thought he wanted one girl awful bad when it was really her sister he wanted all the time. When a man don’t know his own mind, Miss Shirley, ma’am, how’s a poor woman going to be sure of it?”

“We’ll go to the kitchen and clean the silver spoons,” said Anne. “That’s a task which won’t require much thinking fortunately . . . for I _couldn’t_ think tonight. And it will pass the time.”

It passed an hour. Then, just as Anne laid down the last shining spoon, they heard the front door shut. Both sought comfort fearfully in each other’s eyes.

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am,” gasped Charlotta, “if he’s going away this early there’s nothing into it and never will be.” They flew to the window. Mr. Irving had no intention of going away. He and Miss Lavendar were strolling slowly down the middle path to the stone bench.

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, he’s got his arm around her waist,” whispered Charlotta the Fourth delightedly. “He _must_ have proposed to her or she’d never allow it.”

Anne caught Charlotta the Fourth by her own plump waist and danced her around the kitchen until they were both out of breath.

“Oh, Charlotta,” she cried gaily, “I’m neither a prophetess nor the daughter of a prophetess but I’m going to make a prediction. There’ll be a wedding in this old stone house before the maple leaves are red. Do you want that translated into prose, Charlotta?”

“No, I can understand that,” said Charlotta. “A wedding ain’t poetry. Why, Miss Shirley, ma’am, you’re crying! What for?”

“Oh, because it’s all so beautiful . . . and story bookish . . . and romantic . . . and sad,” said Anne, winking the tears out of her eyes. “It’s all perfectly lovely . . . but there’s a little sadness mixed up in it too, somehow.”

“Oh, of course there’s a resk in marrying anybody,” conceded Charlotta the Fourth, “but, when all’s said and done, Miss Shirley, ma’am, there’s many a worse thing than a husband.”

XXIX Poetry and Prose

For the next month Anne lived in what, for Avonlea, might be called a whirl of excitement. The preparation of her own modest outfit for Redmond was of secondary importance. Miss Lavendar was getting ready to be married and the stone house was the scene of endless consultations and plannings and discussions, with Charlotta the Fourth hovering on the outskirts of things in agitated delight and wonder. Then the dressmaker came, and there was the rapture and wretchedness of choosing fashions and being fitted. Anne and Diana spent half their time at Echo Lodge and there were nights when Anne could not sleep for wondering whether she had done right in advising Miss Lavendar to select brown rather than navy blue for her traveling dress, and to have her gray silk made princess.

Everybody concerned in Miss Lavendar’s story was very happy. Paul Irving rushed to Green Gables to talk the news over with Anne as soon as his father had told him.

“I knew I could trust father to pick me out a nice little second mother,” he said proudly. “It’s a fine thing to have a father you can depend on, teacher. I just love Miss Lavendar. Grandma is pleased, too. She says she’s real glad father didn’t pick out an American for his second wife, because, although it turned out all right the first time, such a thing wouldn’t be likely to happen twice. Mrs. Lynde says she thoroughly approves of the match and thinks its likely Miss Lavendar will give up her queer notions and be like other people, now that she’s going to be married. But I hope she won’t give her queer notions up, teacher, because I like them. And I don’t want her to be like other people. There are too many other people around as it is. _You_ know, teacher.”

Charlotta the Fourth was another radiant person.

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, it has all turned out so beautiful. When Mr. Irving and Miss Lavendar come back from their tower I’m to go up to Boston and live with them . . . and me only fifteen, and the other girls never went till they were sixteen. Ain’t Mr. Irving splendid? He just worships the ground she treads on and it makes me feel so queer sometimes to see the look in his eyes when he’s watching her. It beggars description, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I’m awful thankful they’re so fond of each other. It’s the best way, when all’s said and done, though some folks can get along without it. I’ve got an aunt who has been married three times and says she married the first time for love and the last two times for strictly business, and was happy with all three except at the times of the funerals. But I think she took a resk, Miss Shirley, ma’am.”

“Oh, it’s all so romantic,” breathed Anne to Marilla that night. “If I hadn’t taken the wrong path that day we went to Mr. Kimball’s I’d never have known Miss Lavendar; and if I hadn’t met her I’d never have taken Paul there . . . and he’d never have written to his father about visiting Miss Lavendar just as Mr. Irving was starting for San Francisco. Mr. Irving says whenever he got that letter he made up his mind to send his partner to San Francisco and come here instead. He hadn’t heard anything of Miss Lavendar for fifteen years. Somebody had told him then that she was to be married and he thought she was and never asked anybody anything about her. And now everything has come right. And I had a hand in bringing it about. Perhaps, as Mrs. Lynde says, everything is foreordained and it was bound to happen anyway. But even so, it’s nice to think one was an instrument used by predestination. Yes indeed, it’s very romantic.”

“I can’t see that it’s so terribly romantic at all,” said Marilla rather crisply. Marilla thought Anne was too worked up about it and had plenty to do with getting ready for college without “traipsing” to Echo Lodge two days out of three helping Miss Lavendar. “In the first place two young fools quarrel and turn sulky; then Steve Irving goes to the States and after a spell gets married up there and is perfectly happy from all accounts. Then his wife dies and after a decent interval he thinks he’ll come home and see if his first fancy’ll have him. Meanwhile, she’s been living single, probably because nobody nice enough came along to want her, and they meet and agree to be married after all. Now, where is the romance in all that?”

“Oh, there isn’t any, when you put it that way,” gasped Anne, rather as if somebody had thrown cold water over her. “I suppose that’s how it looks in prose. But it’s very different if you look at it through poetry . . . and _I_ think it’s nicer . . .” Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed . . . “to look at it through poetry.”

Marilla glanced at the radiant young face and refrained from further sarcastic comments. Perhaps some realization came to her that after all it was better to have, like Anne, “the vision and the faculty divine” . . . that gift which the world cannot bestow or take away, of looking at life through some transfiguring . . . or revealing? . . . medium, whereby everything seemed apparelled in celestial light, wearing a glory and a freshness not visible to those who, like herself and Charlotta the Fourth, looked at things only through prose.

“When’s the wedding to be?” she asked after a pause.

“The last Wednesday in August. They are to be married in the garden under the honeysuckle trellis . . . the very spot where Mr. Irving proposed to her twenty-five years ago. Marilla, that _is_ romantic, even in prose. There’s to be nobody there except Mrs. Irving and Paul and Gilbert and Diana and I, and Miss Lavendar’s cousins. And they will leave on the six o’clock train for a trip to the Pacific coast. When they come back in the fall Paul and Charlotta the Fourth are to go up to Boston to live with them. But Echo Lodge is to be left just as it is. . . only of course they’ll sell the hens and cow, and board up the windows . . . and every summer they’re coming down to live in it. I’m so glad. It would have hurt me dreadfully next winter at Redmond to think of that dear stone house all stripped and deserted, with empty rooms . . . or far worse still, with other people living in it. But I can think of it now, just as I’ve always seen it, waiting happily for the summer to bring life and laughter back to it again.”

There was more romance in the world than that which had fallen to the share of the middle-aged lovers of the stone house. Anne stumbled suddenly on it one evening when she went over to Orchard Slope by the wood cut and came out into the Barry garden. Diana Barry and Fred Wright were standing together under the big willow. Diana was leaning against the gray trunk, her lashes cast down on very crimson cheeks. One hand was held by Fred, who stood with his face bent toward her, stammering something in low earnest tones. There were no other people in the world except their two selves at that magic moment; so neither of them saw Anne, who, after one dazed glance of comprehension, turned and sped noiselessly back through the spruce wood, never stopping till she gained her own gable room, where she sat breathlessly down by her window and tried to collect her scattered wits.

“Diana and Fred are in love with each other,” she gasped. “Oh, it does seem so . . . so . . . so _hopelessly_ grown up.”

Anne, of late, had not been without her suspicions that Diana was proving false to the melancholy Byronic hero of her early dreams. But as “things seen are mightier than things heard,” or suspected, the realization that it was actually so came to her with almost the shock of perfect surprise. This was succeeded by a queer, little lonely feeling . . . as if, somehow, Diana had gone forward into a new world, shutting a gate behind her, leaving Anne on the outside.

“Things are changing so fast it almost frightens me,” Anne thought, a little sadly. “And I’m afraid that this can’t help making some difference between Diana and me. I’m sure I can’t tell her all my secrets after this . . . she might tell Fred. And what _can_ she see in Fred? He’s very nice and jolly . . . but he’s just Fred Wright.”

It is always a very puzzling question . . . what can somebody see in somebody else? But how fortunate after all that it is so, for if everybody saw alike . . . well, in that case, as the old Indian said, “Everybody would want my squaw.” It was plain that Diana _did_ see something in Fred Wright, however Anne’s eyes might be holden. Diana came to Green Gables the next evening, a pensive, shy young lady, and told Anne the whole story in the dusky seclusion of the east gable. Both girls cried and kissed and laughed.

“I’m so happy,” said Diana, “but it does seem ridiculous to think of me being engaged.”

“What is it really like to be engaged?” asked Anne curiously.

“Well, that all depends on who you’re engaged to,” answered Diana, with that maddening air of superior wisdom always assumed by those who are engaged over those who are not. “It’s perfectly lovely to be engaged to Fred . . . but I think it would be simply horrid to be engaged to anyone else.”

“There’s not much comfort for the rest of us in that, seeing that there is only one Fred,” laughed Anne.

“Oh, Anne, you don’t understand,” said Diana in vexation. “I didn’t mean _that_ . . . it’s so hard to explain. Never mind, you’ll understand sometime, when your own turn comes.”

“Bless you, dearest of Dianas, I understand now. What is an imagination for if not to enable you to peep at life through other people’s eyes?”

“You must be my bridesmaid, you know, Anne. Promise me that . . . wherever you may be when I’m married.”

“I’ll come from the ends of the earth if necessary,” promised Anne solemnly.

“Of course, it won’t be for ever so long yet,” said Diana, blushing. “Three years at the very least . . . for I’m only eighteen and mother says no daughter of hers shall be married before she’s twenty-one. Besides, Fred’s father is going to buy the Abraham Fletcher farm for him and he says he’s got to have it two thirds paid for before he’ll give it to him in his own name. But three years isn’t any too much time to get ready for housekeeping, for I haven’t a speck of fancy work made yet. But I’m going to begin crocheting doilies tomorrow. Myra Gillis had thirty-seven doilies when she was married and I’m determined I shall have as many as she had.”

“I suppose it would be perfectly impossible to keep house with only thirty-six doilies,” conceded Anne, with a solemn face but dancing eyes.

Diana looked hurt.

“I didn’t think you’d make fun of me, Anne,” she said reproachfully.

“Dearest, I wasn’t making fun of you,” cried Anne repentantly. “I was only teasing you a bit. I think you’ll make the sweetest little housekeeper in the world. And I think it’s perfectly lovely of you to be planning already for your home o’dreams.”

Anne had no sooner uttered the phrase, “home o’dreams,” than it captivated her fancy and she immediately began the erection of one of her own. It was, of course, tenanted by an ideal master, dark, proud, and melancholy; but oddly enough, Gilbert Blythe persisted in hanging about too, helping her arrange pictures, lay out gardens, and accomplish sundry other tasks which a proud and melancholy hero evidently considered beneath his dignity. Anne tried to banish Gilbert’s image from her castle in Spain but, somehow, he went on being there, so Anne, being in a hurry, gave up the attempt and pursued her aerial architecture with such success that her “home o’dreams” was built and furnished before Diana spoke again.

“I suppose, Anne, you must think it’s funny I should like Fred so well when he’s so different from the kind of man I’ve always said I would marry . . . the tall, slender kind? But somehow I wouldn’t want Fred to be tall and slender . . . because, don’t you see, he wouldn’t be Fred then. Of course,” added Diana rather dolefully, “we will be a dreadfully pudgy couple. But after all that’s better than one of us being short and fat and the other tall and lean, like Morgan Sloane and his wife. Mrs. Lynde says it always makes her think of the long and short of it when she sees them together.”

“Well,” said Anne to herself that night, as she brushed her hair before her gilt framed mirror, “I am glad Diana is so happy and satisfied. But when my turn comes . . . if it ever does . . . I do hope there’ll be something a little more thrilling about it. But then Diana thought so too, once. I’ve heard her say time and again she’d never get engaged any poky commonplace way . . . he’d _have_ to do something splendid to win her. But she has changed. Perhaps I’ll change too. But I won’t . . . and I’m determined I won’t. Oh, I think these engagements are dreadfully unsettling things when they happen to your intimate friends.”

XXX A Wedding at the Stone House

The last week in August came. Miss Lavendar was to be married in it. Two weeks later Anne and Gilbert would leave for Redmond College. In a week’s time Mrs. Rachel Lynde would move to Green Gables and set up her lares and penates in the erstwhile spare room, which was already prepared for her coming. She had sold all her superfluous household plenishings by auction and was at present reveling in the congenial occupation of helping the Allans pack up. Mr. Allan was to preach his farewell sermon the next Sunday. The old order was changing rapidly to give place to the new, as Anne felt with a little sadness threading all her excitement and happiness.

“Changes ain’t totally pleasant but they’re excellent things,” said Mr. Harrison philosophically. “Two years is about long enough for things to stay exactly the same. If they stayed put any longer they might grow mossy.”

Mr. Harrison was smoking on his veranda. His wife had self-sacrificingly told that he might smoke in the house if he took care to sit by an open window. Mr. Harrison rewarded this concession by going outdoors altogether to smoke in fine weather, and so mutual goodwill reigned.

Anne had come over to ask Mrs. Harrison for some of her yellow dahlias. She and Diana were going through to Echo Lodge that evening to help Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth with their final preparations for the morrow’s bridal. Miss Lavendar herself never had dahlias; she did not like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her old-fashioned garden. But flowers of any kind were rather scarce in Avonlea and the neighboring districts that summer, thanks to Uncle Abe’s storm; and Anne and Diana thought that a certain old cream-colored stone jug, usually kept sacred to doughnuts, brimmed over with yellow dahlias, would be just the thing to set in a dim angle of the stone house stairs, against the dark background of red hall paper.

“I s’pose you’ll be starting off for college in a fortnight’s time?” continued Mr. Harrison. “Well, we’re going to miss you an awful lot, Emily and me. To be sure, Mrs. Lynde’ll be over there in your place. There ain’t nobody but a substitute can be found for them.”

The irony of Mr. Harrison’s tone is quite untransferable to paper. In spite of his wife’s intimacy with Mrs. Lynde, the best that could be said of the relationship between her and Mr. Harrison even under the new regime, was that they preserved an armed neutrality.

“Yes, I’m going,” said Anne. “I’m very glad with my head . . . and very sorry with my heart.”

“I s’pose you’ll be scooping up all the honors that are lying round loose at Redmond.”

“I may try for one or two of them,” confessed Anne, “but I don’t care so much for things like that as I did two years ago. What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.”

Mr. Harrison nodded.

“That’s the idea exactly. That’s what college ought to be for, instead of for turning out a lot of B.A.‘s, so chock full of book-learning and vanity that there ain’t room for anything else. You’re all right. College won’t be able to do you much harm, I reckon.”

Diana and Anne drove over to Echo Lodge after tea, taking with them all the flowery spoil that several predatory expeditions in their own and their neighbors’ gardens had yielded. They found the stone house agog with excitement. Charlotta the Fourth was flying around with such vim and briskness that her blue bows seemed really to possess the power of being everywhere at once. Like the helmet of Navarre, Charlotta’s blue bows waved ever in the thickest of the fray.

“Praise be to goodness you’ve come,” she said devoutly, “for there’s heaps of things to do . . . and the frosting on that cake _won’t_ harden . . . and there’s all the silver to be rubbed up yet . . . and the horsehair trunk to be packed . . . and the roosters for the chicken salad are running out there beyant the henhouse yet, _crowing_, Miss Shirley, ma’am. And Miss Lavendar ain’t to be trusted to do a thing. I was thankful when Mr. Irving came a few minutes ago and took her off for a walk in the woods. Courting’s all right in its place, Miss Shirley, ma’am, but if you try to mix it up with cooking and scouring everything’s spoiled. That’s _my_ opinion, Miss Shirley, ma’am.”

Anne and Diana worked so heartily that by ten o’clock even Charlotta the Fourth was satisfied. She braided her hair in innumerable plaits and took her weary little bones off to bed.

“But I’m sure I shan’t sleep a blessed wink, Miss Shirley, ma’am, for fear that something’ll go wrong at the last minute . . . the cream won’t whip . . . or Mr. Irving’ll have a stroke and not be able to come.”

“He isn’t in the habit of having strokes, is he?” asked Diana, the dimpled corners of her mouth twitching. To Diana, Charlotta the Fourth was, if not exactly a thing of beauty, certainly a joy forever.

“They’re not things that go by habit,” said Charlotta the Fourth with dignity. “They just _happen_ . . . and there you are. _Anybody_ can have a stroke. You don’t have to learn how. Mr. Irving looks a lot like an uncle of mine that had one once just as he was sitting down to dinner one day. But maybe everything’ll go all right. In this world you’ve just got to hope for the best and prepare for the worst and take whatever God sends.”

“The only thing I’m worried about is that it won’t be fine tomorrow,” said Diana. “Uncle Abe predicted rain for the middle of the week, and ever since the big storm I can’t help believing there’s a good deal in what Uncle Abe says.”

Anne, who knew better than Diana just how much Uncle Abe had to do with the storm, was not much disturbed by this. She slept the sleep of the just and weary, and was roused at an unearthly hour by Charlotta the Fourth.

“Oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, it’s awful to call you so early,” came wailing through the keyhole, “but there’s so much to do yet . . . and oh, Miss Shirley, ma’am, I’m skeered it’s going to rain and I wish you’d get up and tell me you think it ain’t.” Anne flew to the window, hoping against hope that Charlotta the Fourth was saying this merely by way of rousing her effectually. But alas, the morning did look unpropitious. Below the window Miss Lavendar’s garden, which should have been a glory of pale virgin sunshine, lay dim and windless; and the sky over the firs was dark with moody clouds.

“Isn’t it too mean!” said Diana.

“We must hope for the best,” said Anne determinedly. “If it only doesn’t actually rain, a cool, pearly gray day like this would really be nicer than hot sunshine.”

“But it will rain,” mourned Charlotta, creeping into the room, a figure of fun, with her many braids wound about her head, the ends, tied up with white thread, sticking out in all directions. “It’ll hold off till the last minute and then pour cats and dogs. And all the folks will get sopping . . . and track mud all over the house . . . and they won’t be able to be married under the honeysuckle . . . and it’s awful unlucky for no sun to shine on a bride, say what you will, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I _knew_ things were going too well to last.”

Charlotta the Fourth seemed certainly to have borrowed a leaf out of Miss Eliza Andrews’ book.

It did not rain, though it kept on looking as if it meant to. By noon the rooms were decorated, the table beautifully laid; and upstairs was waiting a bride, “adorned for her husband.”

“You do look sweet,” said Anne rapturously.

“Lovely,” echoed Diana.