Chapter XXXVIII
False Dawn
“Just imagine—this night week I’ll be in Avonlea—delightful thought!” said
Anne, bending over the box in which she was packing Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s
quilts. “But just imagine—this night week I’ll be gone forever from Patty’s
Place—horrible thought!”
“I wonder if the ghost of all our laughter will echo through the maiden dreams
of Miss Patty and Miss Maria,” speculated Phil.
Miss Patty and Miss Maria were coming home, after having trotted over most
of the habitable globe.
“We’ll be back the second week in May” wrote Miss Patty. “I expect Patty’s
Place will seem rather small after the Hall of the Kings at Karnak, but I never
did like big places to live in. And I’ll be glad enough to be home again. When
you start traveling late in life you’re apt to do too much of it because you know
you haven’t much time left, and it’s a thing that grows on you. I’m afraid Maria
will never be contented again.”
“I shall leave here my fancies and dreams to bless the next comer,” said Anne,
looking around the blue room wistfully—her pretty blue room where she had
spent three such happy years. She had knelt at its window to pray and had bent
from it to watch the sunset behind the pines. She had heard the autumn raindrops
beating against it and had welcomed the spring robins at its sill. She wondered if
old dreams could haunt rooms—if, when one left forever the room where she
had joyed and suffered and laughed and wept, something of her, intangible and
invisible, yet nonetheless real, did not remain behind like a voiceful memory.
“I think,” said Phil, “that a room where one dreams and grieves and rejoices
and lives becomes inseparably connected with those processes and acquires a
personality of its own. I am sure if I came into this room fifty years from now it
would say ‘Anne, Anne’ to me. What nice times we’ve had here, honey! What
chats and jokes and good chummy jamborees! Oh, dear me! I’m to marry Jo in
June and I know I will be rapturously happy. But just now I feel as if I wanted
this lovely Redmond life to go on forever.”