Anne laughed—then shivered.
“I can never forget the night I thought you were dying, Gilbert. Oh, I knew—I knew then—and I thought it was too late.”
“But it wasn’t, sweetheart. Oh, Anne, this makes up for everything, doesn’t it? Let’s resolve to keep this day sacred to perfect beauty all our lives for the gift it has given us.”
“It’s the birthday of our happiness,” said Anne softly. “I’ve always loved this old garden of Hester Gray’s, and now it will be dearer than ever.”
“But I’ll have to ask you to wait a long time, Anne,” said Gilbert sadly. “It will be three years before I’ll finish my medical course. And even then there will be no diamond sunbursts and marble halls.”
Anne laughed.
“I don’t want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want you. You see I’m quite as shameless as Phil about it. Sunbursts and marble halls may be all very well, but there is more ‘scope for imagination’ without them. And as for the waiting, that doesn’t matter. We’ll just be happy, waiting and working for each other—and dreaming. Oh, dreams will be very sweet now.”
Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed her. Then they walked home together in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew.
Endnotes
-
Chronicles of Avonlea. ↩
Colophon
Anne of the Island
was published in 1915 by
L. M. Montgomery.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Gwen Byrne,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2012 by
David Edwards, Wojtek Murawski, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
for
Faded Page Canada
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
My Daughter Elisabeth,
a painting completed circa 1914 by
Frank Weston Benson.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
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