Exactly,” supplied Mrs. Rachel. “Like a book where every page is the same, that’s what. Dora will make a good, reliable woman but she’ll never set the pond on fire. Well, that sort of folks are comfortable to have round, even if they’re not as interesting as the other kind.”
Gilbert Blythe was probably the only person to whom the news of Anne’s resignation brought unmixed pleasure. Her pupils looked upon it as a sheer catastrophe. Annetta Bell had hysterics when she went home. Anthony Pye fought two pitched and unprovoked battles with other boys by way of relieving his feelings. Barbara Shaw cried all night. Paul Irving defiantly told his grandmother that she needn’t expect him to eat any porridge for a week.
“I can’t do it, Grandma,” he said. “I don’t really know if I can eat ANYTHING. I feel as if there was a dreadful lump in my throat. I’d have cried coming home from school if Jake Donnell hadn’t been watching me. I believe I will cry after I go to bed. It wouldn’t show on my eyes tomorrow, would it? And it would be such a relief. But anyway, I can’t eat porridge. I’m going to need all my strength of mind to bear up against this, Grandma, and I won’t have any left to grapple with porridge. Oh Grandma, I don’t know what I’ll do when my beautiful teacher goes away. Milty Boulter says he bets Jane Andrews will get the school. I suppose Miss Andrews is very nice. But I know she won’t understand things like Miss Shirley.”
Diana also took a very pessimistic view of affairs.
“It will be horribly lonesome here next winter,” she mourned, one twilight when the moonlight was raining “airy silver” through the cherry boughs and filling the east gable with a soft, dreamlike radiance in which the two girls sat and talked, Anne on her low rocker by the window, Diana sitting Turkfashion on the bed. “You and Gilbert will be gone … and the Allans too. They are going to call Mr. Allan to Charlottetown and of course he’ll accept. It’s too mean. We’ll be vacant all winter, I suppose, and have to listen to a long string of candidates … and half of them won’t be any good.”
“I hope they won’t call Mr. Baxter from East Grafton here, anyhow,” said Anne decidedly. “He wants the call but he does preach such gloomy sermons. Mr. Bell says he’s a minister of the old school, but Mrs. Lynde says there’s nothing whatever the matter with him but indigestion. His wife isn’t a very good cook, it seems, and Mrs. Lynde says that when a man has to eat sour bread two weeks out of three his theology is bound to get a kink in it somewhere. Mrs. Allan feels very badly about going away. She says everybody has been so kind to her since she came here as a bride that she feels as if she were leaving lifelong friends. And then, there’s the baby’s grave, you know. She says she doesn’t see how she can go away and leave that … it was such a little mite of a thing and only three months old, and she says she is afraid it will miss its mother, although she knows better and wouldn’t say so to Mr. Allan for anything. She says she has slipped through the birch grove back of the manse nearly every night to the graveyard and sung a little lullaby to it. She told me all about it last evening when I was up putting some of those early wild roses on Matthew’s grave. I promised her that as long as I was in Avonlea I would put flowers on the baby’s grave and when I was away I felt sure that …”
“That I would do it,” supplied Diana heartily. “Of course I will. And I’ll put them on Matthew’s grave too, for your sake, Anne.”
“Oh, thank you. I meant to ask you to if you would. And on little Hester Gray’s too? Please don’t forget hers. Do you know, I’ve thought and dreamed so much about little Hester Gray that she has become strangely real to me. I think of her, back there in her little garden in that cool, still, green corner; and I have a fancy that if I could steal back there some spring evening, just at the magic time ‘twixt light and dark, and tiptoe so softly up the beech hill that my footsteps could not frighten her, I would find the garden just as it used to be, all sweet with June lilies and early roses, with the tiny house beyond it all hung with vines; and little Hester Gray would be there, with her soft eyes, and the wind ruffling her dark hair, wandering about, putting her fingertips under the chins of the lilies and whispering secrets with the roses; and I would go forward, oh, so softly, and hold out my hands and say to her, ‘Little Hester Gray, won’t you let me be your playmate, for I love the roses too?’ And we would sit down on the old bench and talk a little and dream a little, or just be beautifully silent together. And then the moon would rise and I would look around me … and there would be no Hester Gray and no little vine-hung house, and no roses … only an old waste garden starred with June lilies amid the grasses, and the wind sighing, oh, so sorrowfully in the cherry trees. And I would not know whether it had been real or if I had just imagined it all.” Diana crawled up and got her back against the headboard of the bed. When your companion of twilight hour said such spooky things it was just as well not to be able to fancy there was anything behind you.
“I’m afraid the Improvement Society will go down when you and Gilbert are both gone,” she remarked dolefully.
“Not a bit of fear of it,” said Anne briskly, coming back from dreamland to the affairs of practical life. “It is too firmly established for that, especially since the older people are becoming so enthusiastic about it. Look what they are doing this summer for their lawns and lanes. Besides, I’ll be watching for hints at Redmond and I’ll write a paper for it next winter and send it over. Don’t take such a gloomy view of things, Diana. And don’t grudge me my little hour of gladness and jubilation now. Later on, when I have to go away, I’ll feel anything but glad.”
“It’s all right for you to be glad … you’re going to college and you’ll have a jolly time and make heaps of lovely new friends.”
“I hope I shall make new friends,” said Anne thoughtfully. “The possibilities of making new friends help to make life very fascinating. But no matter how many friends I make they’ll never be as dear to me as the old ones … especially a certain girl with black eyes and dimples. Can you guess who she is, Diana?”
“But there’ll be so many clever girls at Redmond,” sighed Diana, “and I’m only a stupid little country girl who says ‘I seen’ sometimes… though I really know better when I stop to think. Well, of course these past two years have really been too pleasant to last. I know SOMEBODY who is glad you are going to Redmond anyhow. Anne, I’m going to ask you a question … a serious question. Don’t be vexed and do answer seriously. Do you care anything for Gilbert?”
“Ever so much as a friend and not a bit in the way you mean,” said Anne calmly and decidedly; she also thought she was speaking sincerely.
Diana sighed. She wished, somehow, that Anne had answered differently.
“Don’t you mean EVER to be married, Anne?”
“Perhaps … some day … when I meet the right one,” said Anne, smiling dreamily up at the moonlight.
“But how can you be sure when you do meet the right one?” persisted Diana.
“Oh, I should know him … SOMETHING would tell me. You know what my ideal is, Diana.”
“But people’s ideals change sometimes.”
“Mine won’t. And I COULDN’T care for any man who didn’t fulfill it.”
“What if you never meet him?”
“Then I shall die an old maid,” was the cheerful response. “I daresay it isn’t the hardest death by any means.”
“Oh, I suppose the dying would be easy enough; it’s the living an old maid I shouldn’t like,” said Diana, with no intention of being humorous. “Although
