had no chance at all of inducing Anne to marry him. Nevertheless, she felt a
little resentment that Anne Shirley, who was, after all, merely an adopted
orphan, without kith or kin, should refuse her brother—one of the Avonlea
Andrews. Well, pride sometimes goes before a fall, Jane reflected ominously.
Anne permitted herself to smile in the darkness over the idea that she might
ever regret not marrying Billy Andrews.
“I hope Billy won’t feel very badly over it,” she said nicely.
Jane made a movement as if she were tossing her head on her pillow.
“Oh, he won’t break his heart. Billy has too much good sense for that. He
likes Nettie Blewett pretty well, too, and mother would rather he married her
than any one. She’s such a good manager and saver. I think, when Billy is once
sure you won’t have him, he’ll take Nettie. Please don’t mention this to any one,
will you, Anne?”
“Certainly not,” said Anne, who had no desire whatever to publish abroad the
fact that Billy Andrews wanted to marry her, preferring her, when all was said
and done, to Nettie Blewett. Nettie Blewett!
“And now I suppose we’d better go to sleep,” suggested Jane.
To sleep went Jane easily and speedily; but, though very unlike MacBeth in
most respects, she had certainly contrived to murder sleep for Anne. That
proposed-to damsel lay on a wakeful pillow until the wee sma’s, but her
meditations were far from being romantic. It was not, however, until the next
morning that she had an opportunity to indulge in a good laugh over the whole
affair. When Jane had gone home—still with a hint of frost in voice and manner
because Anne had declined so ungratefully and decidedly the honor of an
alliance with the House of Andrews—Anne retreated to the porch room, shut the
door, and had her laugh out at last.
“If I could only share the joke with some one!” she thought. “But I can’t.
Diana is the only one I’d want to tell, and, even if I hadn’t sworn secrecy to Jane,
I can’t tell Diana things now. She tells everything to Fred—I know she does.
Well, I’ve had my first proposal. I supposed it would come some day—but I
certainly never thought it would be by proxy. It’s awfully funny—and yet there’s
a sting in it, too, somehow.”
Anne knew quite well wherein the sting consisted, though she did not put it
into words. She had had her secret dreams of the first time some one should ask
her the great question. And it had, in those dreams, always been very romantic
and beautiful: and the “some one” was to be very handsome and dark-eyed and
distinguished-looking and eloquent, whether he were Prince Charming to be