Harmon. “If you don’t take care, Anne, all of 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
splendor. 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 first-
born 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.