“Is that the dress you’re going to wear tonight?” asked Gilbert, looking down
at the fluffs and frills.
“Yes. Isn’t it pretty? And I shall wear starflowers in my hair. The Haunted
Wood is full of them this summer.”
Gilbert had a sudden vision of Anne, arrayed in a frilly green gown, with the
virginal curves of arms and throat slipping out of it, and white stars shining
against the coils of her ruddy hair. The vision made him catch his breath. But he
turned lightly away.
“Well, I’ll be up tomorrow. Hope you’ll have a nice time tonight.”
Anne looked after him as he strode away, and sighed. Gilbert was friendly—
very friendly—far too friendly. He had come quite often to Green Gables after
his recovery, and something of their old comradeship had returned. But Anne no
longer found it satisfying. The rose of love made the blossom of friendship pale
and scentless by contrast. And Anne had again begun to doubt if Gilbert now felt
anything for her but friendship. In the common light of common day her radiant
certainty of that rapt morning had faded. She was haunted by a miserable fear
that her mistake could never be rectified. It was quite likely that it was Christine
whom Gilbert loved after all. Perhaps he was even engaged to her. Anne tried to
put all unsettling hopes out of her heart, and reconcile herself to a future where
work and ambition must take the place of love. She could do good, if not noble,
work as a teacher; and the success her little sketches were beginning to meet
with in certain editorial sanctums augured well for her budding literary dreams.
But—but—Anne picked up her green dress and sighed again.
When Gilbert came the next afternoon he found Anne waiting for him, fresh
as the dawn and fair as a star, after all the gaiety of the preceding night. She
wore a green dress—not the one she had worn to the wedding, but an old one
which Gilbert had told her at a Redmond reception he liked especially. It was
just the shade of green that brought out the rich tints of her hair, and the starry
gray of her eyes and the iris-like delicacy of her skin. Gilbert, glancing at her
sideways as they walked along a shadowy woodpath, thought she had never
looked so lovely. Anne, glancing sideways at Gilbert, now and then, thought
how much older he looked since his illness. It was as if he had put boyhood
behind him forever.
The day was beautiful and the way was beautiful. Anne was almost sorry
when they reached Hester Gray’s garden, and sat down on the old bench. But it
was beautiful there, too—as beautiful as it had been on the faraway day of the
Golden Picnic, when Diana and Jane and Priscilla and she had found it. Then it