“Oh,” laughed Anne, “I am going to be an old maid. I really can’t find anyone to suit me.”
It was rather wicked of her. She deliberately meant to remind Mrs. Andrews that if she became an old maid it was not because she had not had at least one chance of marriage. But Mrs. Harmon took swift revenge.
“Well, the over-particular girls generally get left, I notice. And what’s this I hear about Gilbert Blythe being engaged to a Miss Stuart? Charlie Sloane tells me she is perfectly beautiful. Is it true?”
“I don’t know if it is true that he is engaged to Miss Stuart,” replied Anne, with Spartan composure, “but it is certainly true that she is very lovely.”
“I once thought you and Gilbert would have made a match of it,” said Mrs. Harmon. “If you don’t take care, Anne, all your beaux will slip through your fingers.”
Anne decided not to continue her duel with Mrs. Harmon. You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.
“Since Jane is away,” she said, rising haughtily, “I don’t think I can stay longer this morning. I’ll come down when she comes home.”
“Do,” said Mrs. Harmon effusively. “Jane isn’t a bit proud. She just means to associate with her old friends the same as ever. She’ll be real glad to see you.”
Jane’s millionaire arrived the last of May and carried her off in a blaze of splendour. Mrs. Lynde was spitefully gratified to find that Mr. Inglis was every day of forty, and short and thin and grayish. Mrs. Lynde did not spare him in her enumeration of his shortcomings, you may be sure.
“It will take all his gold to gild a pill like him, that’s what,” said Mrs. Rachel solemnly.
“He looks kind and good-hearted,” said Anne loyally, “and I’m sure he thinks the world of Jane.”
“Humph!” said Mrs. Rachel.
Phil Gordon was married the next week and Anne went over to Bolingbroke to be her bridesmaid. Phil made a dainty fairy of a bride, and the Rev. Jo was so radiant in his happiness that nobody thought him plain.
“We’re going for a lovers’ saunter through the land of Evangeline,” said Phil, “and then we’ll settle down on Patterson Street. Mother thinks it is terrible—she thinks Jo might at least take a church in a decent place. But the wilderness of the Patterson slums will blossom like the rose for me if Jo is there. Oh, Anne, I’m so happy my heart aches with it.”
Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by a happiness that is not your own. And it was just the same when she went back to Avonlea. This time it was Diana who was bathed in the wonderful glory that comes to a woman when her firstborn is laid beside her. Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.
“Isn’t he perfectly beautiful?” said Diana proudly.
The little fat fellow was absurdly like Fred—just as round, just as red. Anne really could not say conscientiously that she thought him beautiful, but she vowed sincerely that he was sweet and kissable and altogether delightful.
“Before he came I wanted a girl, so that I could call her Anne,” said Diana. “But now that little Fred is here I wouldn’t exchange him for a million girls. He just couldn’t have been anything but his own precious self.”
“ ‘Every little baby is the sweetest and the best,’ ” quoted Mrs. Allan gaily. “If little Anne had come you’d have felt just the same about her.”
Mrs. Allan was visiting in Avonlea, for the first time since leaving it. She was as gay and sweet and sympathetic as ever. Her old girl friends had welcomed her back rapturously. The reigning minister’s wife was an estimable lady, but she was not exactly a kindred spirit.
“I can hardly wait till he gets old enough to talk,” sighed Diana. “I just long to hear him say ‘mother.’ And oh, I’m determined that his first memory of me shall be a nice one. The first memory I have of my mother is of her slapping me for something I had done. I am sure I deserved it, and mother was always a good mother and I love her dearly. But I do wish my first memory of her was nicer.”
“I have just one memory of my mother and it is the sweetest of all my memories,” said Mrs. Allan. “I was five years old, and I had been allowed to go to school one day with my two older sisters. When school came out my sisters went home in different groups, each supposing I was with the other. Instead I had run off with a little girl I had played with at recess. We went to her home, which was near the school, and began making mud pies. We were having a glorious time when my older sister arrived, breathless and angry.
“ ‘You naughty girl,’ she cried, snatching my reluctant hand and dragging me along with her. ‘Come home this minute. Oh, you’re going to catch it! Mother is awful cross. She is going to give you a good whipping.’
“I had never been whipped. Dread and terror filled my poor little heart. I have never been so miserable in my life as I was on that walk home. I had not meant to be naughty. Phemy Cameron had asked me to go home with her and I had not known it was wrong to go. And now I was
