Chapter XXI
Roses of Yesterday
The fortnight Anne spent in Bolingbroke was a very pleasant one, with a little
under current of vague pain and dissatisfaction running through it whenever she
thought about Gilbert. There was not, however, much time to think about him.
“Mount Holly,” the beautiful old Gordon homestead, was a very gay place,
overrun by Phil’s friends of both sexes. There was quite a bewildering
succession of drives, dances, picnics and boating parties, all expressively lumped
together by Phil under the head of “jamborees”; Alec and Alonzo were so
constantly on hand that Anne wondered if they ever did anything but dance
attendance on that will-o’-the-wisp of a Phil. They were both nice, manly
fellows, but Anne would not be drawn into any opinion as to which was the
nicer.
“And I depended so on you to help me make up my mind which of them I
should promise to marry,” mourned Phil.
“You must do that for yourself. You are quite expert at making up your mind
as to whom other people should marry,” retorted Anne, rather caustically.
“Oh, that’s a very different thing,” said Phil, truly.
But the sweetest incident of Anne’s sojourn in Bolingbroke was the visit to
her birthplace—the little shabby yellow house in an out-of-the-way street she
had so often dreamed about. She looked at it with delighted eyes, as she and Phil
turned in at the gate.
“It’s almost exactly as I’ve pictured it,” she said. “There is no honeysuckle
over the windows, but there is a lilac tree by the gate, and—yes, there are the
muslin curtains in the windows. How glad I am it is still painted yellow.”
A very tall, very thin woman opened the door.
“Yes, the Shirleys lived here twenty years ago,” she said, in answer to Anne’s
question. “They had it rented. I remember ‘em. They both died of fever at onct.
It was turrible sad. They left a baby. I guess it’s dead long ago. It was a sickly
thing. Old Thomas and his wife took it—as if they hadn’t enough of their own.”
“It didn’t die,” said Anne, smiling. “I was that baby.”