… actually listen … to people talking about Terry’s infatuation for you. Oh, people have been watching you! They know what you’ve been doing. And why … why! That is what I cannot understand. You had your own lover … why couldn’t you have left me mine? What had you against me? What had I ever done to you?”
“I think,” said Anne, thoroughly exasperated, “that you and Terry both need a good spanking. If you weren’t too angry to listen to reason …”
“Oh, I’m not angry, Miss Shirley … only hurt … terribly hurt,” said Hazel in a voice positively foggy with tears. “I feel that I have been betrayed in everything … in friendship as well as in love. Well, they say after your heart is broken you never suffer any more. I hope it’s true, but I fear it isn’t.”
“What has become of your ambition, Hazel? And what about the millionaire patient and the honeymoon villa on the blue Mediterranean?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Shirley. I’m not a bit ambitious … I’m not one of those dreadful new women. My highest ambition was to be a happy wife and make a happy home for my husband. Was … was! To think it should be in the past tense! Well, it doesn’t do to trust any one. I’ve learned that. A bitter, bitter lesson!”
Hazel wiped her eyes and Anne wiped her nose, and Dusty Miller glared at the evening star with the expression of a misanthrope.
“You’d better go, I think, Hazel. I’m really very busy and I can’t see that there is anything to be gained by prolonging this interview.”
Hazel walked to the door with the air of Mary Queen of Scots advancing to the scaffold, and turned there dramatically.
“Farewell, Miss Shirley. I leave you to your conscience.”
Anne, left alone with her conscience, laid down her pen, sneezed three times and gave herself a plain talking-to.
“You may be a B.A., Anne Shirley, but you have a few things to learn yet … things that even Rebecca Dew could have told you … did tell you. Be honest with yourself, my dear girl, and take your medicine like a gallant lady. Admit that you were carried off your feet by flattery. Admit that you really liked Hazel’s professed adoration for you. Admit you found it pleasant to be worshiped. Admit that you liked the idea of being a sort of dea ex machina … saving people from their own folly when they didn’t in the least want to be saved from it. And having admitted all this and feeling wiser and sadder and a few thousand years older, pick up your pen and proceed with your examination papers, pausing to note in passing that Myra Pringle thinks a seraph is ‘an animal that abounds in Africa.’”
Chapter XII
A week later a letter came for Anne, written on pale blue paper edged with silver.
“DEAR MISS SHIRLEY:
“I am writing this to tell you that all misunderstanding is cleared away between Terry and me and we are so deeply, intensely, wonderfully happy that we have decided we can forgive you. Terry says he was just moonlighted into making love to you but that his heart never really swerved in its allegiance to me. He says he really likes sweet, simple girls … that all men do … and has no use for intriguing, designing ones. We don’t understand why you behaved to us as you did … we never will understand. Perhaps you just wanted material for a story and thought you could find it in tampering with the first sweet, tremulous love of a girl. But we thank you for revealing us to ourselves. Terry says he never realized the deeper meaning of life before. So really it was all for the best. We are so sympathetic … we can feel each other’s thoughts. Nobody understands him but me and I want to be a source of inspiration to him forever. I am not clever like you but I feel I can be that, for we are soul-mates and have vowed eternal truth and constancy to each other, no matter how many jealous people and false friends may try to make trouble between us.
“We are going to be married as soon as I have my trousseau ready. I am going up to Boston to get it. There really isn’t anything in Summerside. My dress is to be white moire and my traveling-suit will be dove gray with hat, gloves and blouse of delphinium blue. Of course I’m very young, but I want to be married when I am young, before the bloom goes off life.
“Terry is all that my wildest dreams could picture and every thought of my heart is for him alone. I know we are going to be rapturously happy. Once I believed all my friends would rejoice with me in my happiness, but I have learned a bitter lesson in worldly wisdom since then.
“Yours truly,
“HAZEL MARR.
“P.S. 1. You told me Terry had such a temper. Why, he’s a perfect lamb, his sister says.
“H.M.
“P.S. 2. I’ve heard that lemon juice will bleach freckles. You might try it on your nose.
“H.M.”
“To quote Rebecca Dew,” remarked Anne to Dusty Miller, “postscript Number Two is the last straw.”
Chapter XIII
Anne went home for her second Summerside vacation with mixed feelings. Gilbert was not to be in Avonlea that summer. He had gone west to work on a new railroad that was being built. But Green Gables was still Green Gables and Avonlea was still Avonlea. The Lake of Shining Waters shone and sparkled as of old. The ferns still grew as thickly over the Dryad’s Bubble, and the log-bridge, though it was a little crumblier and mossier every year, still led up to the shadows and silences and wind-songs of the Haunted Wood.
And Anne had prevailed on Mrs. Campbell to let little Elizabeth go home with her for a fortnight … no more. But Elizabeth, looking forward to two whole weeks with Miss Shirley, asked no more of life.
“I feel like Miss Elizabeth today,” she told Anne with a sigh of delightful excitement, as they drove away from Windy Poplars. “Will you please call me ‘Miss Elizabeth’ when you introduce me to your friends at Green Gables? It would make me feel so grown up.”
“I will,” promised Anne gravely, remembering a small, redheaded damsel who had once begged to be called Cordelia.
Elizabeth’s drive from Blight River to Green Gables, over a road which only Prince Edward Island in June can show, was almost as ecstatic a thing for her as it had been for Anne that memorable spring evening so many years ago. The world was beautiful, with windrippled meadows on every hand and surprises lurking around every corner. She was with her beloved Miss Shirley; she would be free from the Woman for two whole weeks; she had a new pink gingham dress and a pair of lovely new brown boots. It was almost as if Tomorrow were already there … with fourteen Tomorrows to follow. Elizabeth’s eyes were shining with dreams when they turned into the Green Gables lane where the pink wild roses grew.
Things
