I can’t make up my mind yet which to marry,” wrote Phil. “I do wish you had come with me to decide for me. Some one will have to. When I saw Alec my heart gave a great thump and I thought, ‘He might be the right one.’ And then, when Alonzo came, thump went my heart again. So that’s no guide, though it should be, according to all the novels I’ve ever read. Now, Anne, YOUR heart wouldn’t thump for anybody but the genuine Prince Charming, would it? There must be something radically wrong with mine. But I’m having a perfectly gorgeous time. How I wish you were here! It’s snowing today, and I’m rapturous. I was so afraid we’d have a green Christmas and I loathe them. You know, when Christmas is a dirty grayey-browney affair, looking as if it had been left over a hundred years ago and had been in soak ever since, it is called a GREEN Christmas! Don’t ask me why. As Lord Dundreary says, ‘there are thome thingth no fellow can underthtand.’
“Anne, did you ever get on a street car and then discover that you hadn’t any money with you to pay your fare? I did, the other day. It’s quite awful. I had a nickel with me when I got on the car. I thought it was in the left pocket of my coat. When I got settled down comfortably I felt for it. It wasn’t there. I had a cold chill. I felt in the other pocket. Not there. I had another chill. Then I felt in a little inside pocket. All in vain. I had two chills at once.
“I took off my gloves, laid them on the seat, and went over all my pockets again. It was not there. I stood up and shook myself, and then looked on the floor. The car was full of people, who were going home from the opera, and they all stared at me, but I was past caring for a little thing like that.
“But I could not find my fare. I concluded I must have put it in my mouth and swallowed it inadvertently.
“I didn’t know what to do. Would the conductor, I wondered, stop the car and put me off in ignominy and shame? Was it possible that I could convince him that I was merely the victim of my own absentmindedness, and not an unprincipled creature trying to obtain a ride upon false pretenses? How I wished that Alec or Alonzo were there. But they weren’t because I wanted them. If I HADN’T wanted them they would have been there by the dozen. And I couldn’t decide what to say to the conductor when he came around. As soon as I got one sentence of explanation mapped out in my mind I felt nobody could believe it and I must compose another. It seemed there was nothing to do but trust in Providence, and for all the comfort that gave me I might as well have been the old lady who, when told by the captain during a storm that she must put her trust in the Almighty exclaimed, ‘Oh, Captain, is it as bad as that?’
“Just at the conventional moment, when all hope had fled, and the conductor was holding out his box to the passenger next to me, I suddenly remembered where I had put that wretched coin of the realm. I hadn’t swallowed it after all. I meekly fished it out of the index finger of my glove and poked it in the box. I smiled at everybody and felt that it was a beautiful world.”
The visit to Echo Lodge was not the least pleasant of many pleasant holiday outings. Anne and Diana went back to it by the old way of the beech woods, carrying a lunch basket with them. Echo Lodge, which had been closed ever since Miss Lavendar’s wedding, was briefly thrown open to wind and sunshine once more, and firelight glimmered again in the little rooms. The perfume of Miss Lavendar’s rose bowl still filled the air. It was hardly possible to believe that Miss Lavendar would not come tripping in presently, with her brown eyes a-star with welcome, and that Charlotta the Fourth, blue of bow and wide of smile, would not pop through the door. Paul, too, seemed hovering around, with his fairy fancies.
“It really makes me feel a little bit like a ghost revisiting the old time glimpses of the moon,” laughed Anne. “Let’s go out and see if the echoes are at home. Bring the old horn. It is still behind the kitchen door.”
The echoes were at home, over the white river, as silver-clear and multitudinous as ever; and when they had ceased to answer the girls locked up Echo Lodge again and went away in the perfect half hour that follows the rose and saffron of a winter sunset.
Chapter VIII.
Anne’s First Proposal
The old year did not slip away in a green twilight, with a pinky-yellow sunset. Instead, it went out with a wild, white bluster and blow. It was one of the nights when the storm-wind hurtles over the frozen meadows and black hollows, and moans around the eaves like a lost creature, and drives the snow sharply against the shaking panes.
“Just the sort of night people like to cuddle down between their blankets and count their mercies,” said Anne to Jane Andrews, who had come up to spend the afternoon and stay all night. But when they were cuddled between their blankets, in Anne’s little porch room, it was not her mercies of which Jane was thinking.
“Anne,” she said very solemnly, “I want to tell you something. May I”
Anne was feeling rather sleepy after the party Ruby Gillis had given the night before. She would much rather have gone to sleep than listen to Jane’s confidences, which she was sure would bore her. She had no prophetic inkling of what was coming. Probably Jane was engaged, too; rumor averred that Ruby Gillis was engaged to the Spencervale schoolteacher, about whom all the girls were said to be quite wild.
“I’ll soon be the only fancy-free maiden of our old quartet,” thought Anne, drowsily. Aloud she said, “Of course.”
“Anne,” said Jane, still more solemnly, “what do you think of my brother Billy?”
Anne gasped over this unexpected question, and floundered helplessly in her thoughts. Goodness, what DID she think of Billy Andrews? She had never thought ANYTHING about him — round-faced, stupid, perpetually smiling, goodnatured Billy Andrews. Did ANYBODY ever think about Billy Andrews?
“I — I don’t understand, Jane,” she stammered. “What do you mean — exactly?”
“Do you like Billy?” asked Jane bluntly.
“Why — why — yes, I like him, of course,” gasped Anne, wondering if she were telling the literal truth. Certainly she did not DISlike Billy. But could the indifferent tolerance with which she regarded him, when he happened to be in her range of vision, be considered positive enough for liking? WHAT was Jane trying to elucidate?
“Would you like him for a husband?” asked Jane calmly.
“A husband!” Anne had been sitting up in bed, the better to wrestle with the problem of her exact opinion of Billy Andrews. Now she fell flatly back on her pillows, the very breath gone out of her. “Whose husband?”
“Yours, of course,” answered Jane. “Billy wants to marry you. He’s always been crazy about you — and now father has given him the upper farm in his own name and there’s nothing to prevent him from getting married. But he’s so shy he couldn’t ask you himself if you’d have him, so he got me to do it. I’d rather not have, but he gave me no peace till I said I would, if I got a good chance. What do you think about it, Anne?”
Was it a dream? Was it one of those nightmare things in which you find yourself engaged or married to some one you hate or don’t know, without the slightest idea how it ever came about? No, she, Anne Shirley, was lying there, wide awake, in her own bed, and Jane Andrews was beside her, calmly proposing for her brother Billy. Anne did not know whether she wanted to writhe or laugh; but she could do neither, for Jane’s feelings must not be hurt.
“I
