taken the pins out—they made her head ache, she said. The hectic flush was
gone for the time, leaving her pale and childlike.
The moon rose in the silvery sky, empearling the clouds around her. Below,
the pond shimmered in its hazy radiance. Just beyond the Gillis homestead was
the church, with the old graveyard beside it. The moonlight shone on the white
stones, bringing them out in clear-cut relief against the dark trees behind.
“How strange the graveyard looks by moonlight!” said Ruby suddenly. “How
ghostly!” she shuddered. “Anne, it won’t be long now before I’ll be lying over
there. You and Diana and all the rest will be going about, full of life—and I’ll be
there—in the old graveyard—dead!”
The surprise of it bewildered Anne. For a few moments she could not speak.
“You know it’s so, don’t you?” said Ruby insistently.
“Yes, I know,” answered Anne in a low tone. “Dear Ruby, I know.”
“Everybody knows it,” said Ruby bitterly. “I know it—I’ve known it all
summer, though I wouldn’t give in. And, oh, Anne”—she reached out and
caught Anne’s hand pleadingly, impulsively—“I don’t want to die. I’m AFRAID
to die.”
“Why should you be afraid, Ruby?” asked Anne quietly.
“Because—because—oh, I’m not afraid but that I’ll go to heaven, Anne. I’m a
church member. But—it’ll be all so different. I think—and think—and I get so
frightened—and—and—homesick. Heaven must be very beautiful, of course,
the Bible says so—but, Anne, IT WON’T BE WHAT I’VE BEEN USED TO.”
Through Anne’s mind drifted an intrusive recollection of a funny story she
had heard Philippa Gordon tell—the story of some old man who had said very
much the same thing about the world to come. It had sounded funny then—she
remembered how she and Priscilla had laughed over it. But it did not seem in the
least humorous now, coming from Ruby’s pale, trembling lips. It was sad, tragic
—and true! Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used to. There had been
nothing in her gay, frivolous life, her shallow ideals and aspirations, to fit her for
that great change, or make the life to come seem to her anything but alien and
unreal and undesirable. Anne wondered helplessly what she could say that would
help her. Could she say anything? “I think, Ruby,” she began hesitatingly—for it
was difficult for Anne to speak to any one of the deepest thoughts of her heart,
or the new ideas that had vaguely begun to shape themselves in her mind,
concerning the great mysteries of life here and hereafter, superseding her old
childish conceptions, and it was hardest of all to speak of them to such as Ruby
Gillis—“I think, perhaps, we have very mistaken ideas about heaven—what it is