be, looking after that man all day and all night?”
Laura pulled The Story Girl from her knapsack and began to leaf through it, trying to find the place where she had left off reading it on the train. She was now only half-listening.
“Well, I really don’t know,” Bobbie continued. “But the poor woman is a real case. I’d avoid her.”
“Who’s a case, Bobbie?” Grandpa asked, at the door.
“Mrs. Macdonald. Oh, I know you have a soft spot for her, Dr. Campbell, but she seems a strange one to me. I can’t figure her out.”
“Maud Macdonald? Well now, I knew her as a girl. She wasn’t always like she is now. She was—but look at that!”
Laura looked up to see her grandfather pointing to the book in her hands.
“I’ll be!” he exclaimed. “That’s one of her books, one of Maud’s books! Look at the name of the author. ‘L.M. Montgomery.’ That’s Maud Macdonald!”
Laura looked at the book, confused. Grandpa went on: “Lucy Maud. Montgomery was her name before she was married. She’s the pride of Cavendish.”
“What do you mean, Grandpa? Where’s Cavendish?”
“Why, that’s where I lived for a short while, back in Prince Edward Island.”
“And?”
“And little Maud was one of the girls in the school there. Funny little thing was Maud. Talked to herself a lot. They said she believed in fairies and such creatures. A fine lass all the same. High-spirited and jolly. And very clever.”
Laura looked down at the book again, at the cover picture of the girl who seemed to be gazing into the distance. She couldn’t believe it!
“I read another book by her,” she said. “It was called Anne of Green Gables. The librarian told me if I liked that book, I’d like this one too. And I do.”
“A great shame,” Grandpa continued. He shook his head. “She’s had it hard these past years. She seems to have turned in on herself now. Of course, one can hardly blame her.” He looked at his watch. “Bobbie, it’s past the time you usually leave. As for Laura and me—it’s suppertime.”
At supper in the panelled dining room, Laura continued to question her grandfather about Mrs. Macdonald. “Are you sure she’s the same person as L.M. Montgomery, Grandpa? Did you know her when she was my age? What was she like?”
Grandpa laughed as he scooped up a forkful of potatoes. “In many ways she was just a normal youngster like the rest of us,” he said. “In the summertime we picked berries and went trout-fishing and walked for miles in the sand along the shoreline. In the winter we sledded down the hills and went to parties in eachother’s homes. Maud was often the life of the party.”
“Grandpa, is she, is she a nice lady? Do you think she’ll she talk to me?”
“Who? Maud?” Her grandfather laughed again. “Well now, ‘nice’ may not be the best word to describe her. She doesn’t bother the neighbors much, I’ll give her that. She keeps to herself. Soon after we moved in here and I discovered that it was Maud living across the street, I went over and introduced myself to the two of them, thinking to get re-acquainted after all these years. The husband was cordial enough, though quiet. Maud seemed to remember me, but didn’t want to reminisce about the old days. She seemed distracted, as if she had too much on her mind. She’s not been well lately. It’s her nerves, mainly. At least, that’s my understanding.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lucy.
“Well, she seems to get easily upset. She’s nervous and anxious about small things that you or I wouldn’t bother ourselves with.”
“What kinds of things?”
Grandpa wiped his plate with a piece of bread. He chewed a moment in silence. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a big chore just to get herself through the day, I imagine. Of course, it isn’t any wonder, with him the way he is.”
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“You ask a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer, young lady,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ve never been told, but it may be a condition called senile dementia. Do you know what that means?”
Laura shook her head.
“Sometimes when people get old, they—well, their minds start to go. Just like your body sometimes begins to wear out— your joints get stiff, and your eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and your hearing begins to go—well, it’s sometimes the same with the mind. You imagine things that aren’t true, you begin to think your friends are against you. Anyway, enough of all that. Here, let me take your plate and I’ll get us some dessert.”
Grandpa piled her plate on top of his and rose from the table. “Having a wife who’s famous doesn’t help either,” he continued. “Times are changing. Women like your mother are working in factories and enlisting in the armed services. But the way we, Ewan and I, were brought up—why, it was considered a man’s duty to support his wife. Ewan’s wife is supporting him.”
He disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen and re-emerged with two dishes of canned fruit. “A special treat to welcome you,” he said, setting one of the dishes in front of Laura and the other in front of himself. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but anything in tins is almost impossible to get anymore. Every bit of tin and steel is being used for the war effort.”
“I know,” said Laura. “And bottles are hard to get too. We collect old bottles and wash them and scrape off the labels and take them to the hardware store. They give us twenty-five cents for a sackful.”
The fruit was chunky and sweet. “Grandpa,” said Laura, licking the syrup from her spoon, “tell me about....”
“Aha! I knew it was coming. Tell me about the olden days.’ Back a hundred years ago, when I was young.”
“Yes, but tell me about Mrs. Macdonald—about Lucy Maud.”
“Ah, Lucy Maud. She hated the name Lucy, I remember. If you called her Lucy Maud, she’d turn her head sharply with her little nose in the air, and her hair would go flying, and she wouldn’t speak to you the rest of the day.” He sat back, wiped his serviette over his moustache, and chuckled.
“I remember sitting behind her in school. One day I took some strands of her hair and knotted them together. Was she in a state! My chum, Nate Lockhart, was awful sweet on her. He would have done anything to have Maud Montgomery as his sweetheart. But no. No one was going to marry Miss Maud. She was going to be a writer—that’s what she always said. She was awfully good at composing, I remember that, even as a young girl. She wrote lovely verses about the sea and adventures of one kind and another, and I remember the excitement the first time she got a poem printed in the Charlottetown paper.”
“What did she look like? Was she pretty?”
“Pretty?” Grandpa cocked his head to one side and
