might not be disregarded or evaded. The next morning the word went from
house to house that Ruby Gillis was dead. She had died in her sleep, painlessly
and calmly, and on her face was a smile—as if, after all, death had come as a
kindly friend to lead her over the threshold, instead of the grisly phantom she
had dreaded.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was
the handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as she lay, white-
clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was
remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been
beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain
insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never
shone through it, intellect had never refined it. But death had touched it and
consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen
before—doing what life and love and great sorrow and deep womanhood joys
might have done for Ruby. Anne, looking down through a mist of tears, at her
old playfellow, thought she saw the face God had meant Ruby to have, and
remembered it so always.
Mrs. Gillis called Anne aside into a vacant room before the funeral procession
left the house, and gave her a small packet.
“I want you to have this,” she sobbed. “Ruby would have liked you to have it.
It’s the embroidered centerpiece she was working at. It isn’t quite finished—the
needle is sticking in it just where her poor little fingers put it the last time she
laid it down, the afternoon before she died.”
“There’s always a piece of unfinished work left,” said Mrs. Lynde, with tears
in her eyes. “But I suppose there’s always some one to finish it.”
“How difficult it is to realize that one we have always known can really be
dead,” said Anne, as she and Diana walked home. “Ruby is the first of our
schoolmates to go. One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Diana uncomfortably. She did not want to talk of
that. She would have preferred to have discussed the details of the funeral—the
splendid white velvet casket Mr. Gillis had insisted on having for Ruby—“the
Gillises must always make a splurge, even at funerals,” quoth Mrs. Rachel
Lynde—Herb Spencer’s sad face, the uncontrolled, hysteric grief of one of
Ruby’s sisters—but Anne would not talk of these things. She seemed wrapped in
a reverie in which Diana felt lonesomely that she had neither lot nor part.
“Ruby Gillis was a great girl to laugh,” said Davy suddenly. “Will she laugh
as much in heaven as she did in Avonlea, Anne? I want to know.”