“I’m so glad we can keep Patty’s Place for another year,” said Stella. “I was
afraid they’d come back. And then our jolly little nest here would be broken up
—and we poor callow nestlings thrown out on the cruel world of boardinghouses
again.”
“I’m off for a tramp in the park,” announced Phil, tossing her book aside. “I
think when I am eighty I’ll be glad I went for a walk in the park tonight.”
“What do you mean?” asked Anne.
“Come with me and I’ll tell you, honey.”
They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March
evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence
—a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds
which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The
girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the
heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.
“I’d go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how,”
declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green
tips of the pines. “It’s all so wonderful here—this great, white stillness, and
those dark trees that always seem to be thinking.”
“‘The woods were God’s first temples,’” quoted Anne softly. “One can’t help
feeling reverent and adoring in such a place. I always feel so near Him when I
walk among the pines.”
“Anne, I’m the happiest girl in the world,” confessed Phil suddenly.
“So Mr. Blake has asked you to marry him at last?” said Anne calmly.
“Yes. And I sneezed three times while he was asking me. Wasn’t that horrid?
But I said ‘yes’ almost before he finished—I was so afraid he might change his
mind and stop. I’m besottedly happy. I couldn’t really believe before that Jonas
would ever care for frivolous me.”
“Phil, you’re not really frivolous,” said Anne gravely. “‘Way down
underneath that frivolous exterior of yours you’ve got a dear, loyal, womanly
little soul. Why do you hide it so?”
“I can’t help it, Queen Anne. You are right—I’m not frivolous at heart. But
there’s a sort of frivolous skin over my soul and I can’t take it off. As Mrs.
Poyser says, I’d have to be hatched over again and hatched different before I
could change it. But Jonas knows the real me and loves me, frivolity and all.
And I love him. I never was so surprised in my life as I was when I found out I
loved him. I’d never thought it possible to fall in love with an ugly man. Fancy