Hazel shivered at the very idea and scrutinized a half-moon critically.
“I suppose …” began Anne.
“We haven’t anything in common, you know, Miss Shirley. He doesn’t care for poetry and romance, and they’re my very life. Sometimes I think I must be a reincarnation of Cleopatra … or would it be Helen of Troy? … one of those languorous, seductive creatures, anyhow. I have such wonderful thoughts and feelings … I don’t know where I get them if that isn’t the explanation. And Terry is so terribly matter-of-fact … he can’t be a reincarnation of anybody. What he said when I told him about Vera Fry’s quill pen proves that, doesn’t it?”
“But I never heard of Vera Fry’s quill pen,” said Anne patiently.
“Oh, haven’t you? I thought I’d told you. I’ve told you so much. Vera’s fiance gave her a quill pen he’d made out of a feather he’d picked up that had fallen from a crow’s wing. He said to her, ‘Let your spirit soar to heaven with it whenever you use it, like the bird who once bore it.’ Wasn’t that just wonderful? But Terry said the pen would wear out very soon, especially if Vera wrote as much as she talked, and anyway he didn’t think crows ever soared to heaven. He just missed the meaning of the whole thing completely … it’s very essence.”
“What was its meaning?”
“Oh … why … why … soaring, you know … getting away from the clods of earth. Did you notice Vera’s ring? A sapphire. I think sapphires are too dark for engagement rings. I’d rather have your dear, romantic little hoop of pearls. Terry wanted to give me my ring right away … but I said not yet a while … it would seem like a fetter … so irrevocable, you know. I wouldn’t have felt like that if I’d really loved him, would I?”
“No, I’m afraid not …”
“It’s been so wonderful to tell somebody what I really feel like. Oh, Miss Shirley, if I could only find myself free again … free to seek the deeper meaning of life! Terry wouldn’t understand what I meant if I said that to him. And I know he has a temper … all the Garlands have. Oh, Miss Shirley … if you would just talk to him … tell him what I feel like … he thinks you’re wonderful … he’d be guided by what you say.”
“Hazel, my dear little girl, how could I do that?”
“I don’t see why not.” Hazel finished the last new moon and laid the orangewood stick down tragically. “If you can’t, there isn’t any help anywhere. But I can never, never, NEVER marry Terry Garland.”
“If you don’t love Terry, you ought to go to him and tell him so … no matter how badly it will make him feel. Some day you’ll meet some one you can really love, Hazel dear … you won’t have any doubts then … you’ll know.”
“I shall never love anybody again,” said Hazel, stonily calm. “Love brings only sorrow. Young as I am I have learned that. This would make a wonderful plot for one of your stories, wouldn’t it, Miss Shirley? I must be going … I’d no idea it was so late. I feel so much better since I’ve confided in you … ‘touched your soul in shadowland,’ as Shakespeare says.”
“I think it was Pauline Johnson,” said Anne gently.
“Well, I knew it was somebody … somebody who had lived. I think I shall sleep tonight, Miss Shirley. I’ve hardly slept since I found myself engaged to Terry, without the least notion how it had all come about.”
Hazel fluffed out her hair and put on her hat, a hat with a rosy lining to its brim and rosy blossoms around it. She looked so distractingly pretty in it that Anne kissed her impulsively. “You’re the prettiest thing, darling,” she said admiringly.
Hazel stood very still.
Then she lifted her eyes and stared clear through the ceiling of the tower room, clear through the attic above it, and sought the stars.
“I shall never, never forget this wonderful moment, Miss Shirley,” she murmured rapturously. “I feel that my beauty … if I have any … has been consecrated. Oh, Miss Shirley, you don’t know how really terrible it is to have a reputation for beauty and to be always afraid that when people meet you they will not think you as pretty as you were reported to be. It’s torture. Sometimes I just die of mortification because I fancy I can see they’re disappointed. Perhaps it’s only my imagination … I’m so imaginative … too much so for my own good, I fear. I imagined I was in love with Terry, you see. Oh, Miss Shirley, can you smell the apple-blossom fragrance?”
Having a nose, Anne could.
“Isn’t it just divine? I hope heaven will be all flowers. One could be good if one lived in a lily, couldn’t one?”
“I’m afraid it might be a little confining,” said Anne perversely.
“Oh, Miss Shirley, don’t … don’t be sarcastic with your little adorer. Sarcasm just shrivels me up like a leaf.”
“I see she hasn’t talked you quite to death,” said Rebecca Dew, when Anne had come back after seeing Hazel to the end of Spook’s Lane. “I don’t see how you put up with her.”
“I like her, Rebecca, I really do. I was a dreadful little chatterbox when I was a child. I wonder if I sounded as silly to the people who had to listen to me as Hazel does sometimes.”
“I didn’t know you when you was a child but I’m sure you didn’t,” said Rebecca. “Because you would mean what you said no matter how you expressed it and Hazel Marr doesn’t. She’s nothing but skim milk pretending to be cream.”
“Oh, of course she dramatizes herself a bit as most girls do, but I think she means some of the things she says,” said Anne, thinking of Terry. Perhaps it was because she had a rather poor opinion of the said Terry that she believed Hazel was quite in earnest in all she said about him. Anne thought Hazel was throwing herself away on Terry in spite of the ten thousand he was “coming into.” Anne considered Terry a goodlooking, rather weak youth who would fall in love with the first pretty girl who made eyes at him and would, with equal facility, fall in love with the next one if Number One turned him down or left him alone too long.
Anne had seen a good deal of Terry that spring, for Hazel had insisted on her playing gooseberry frequently; and she was destined to see more of him, for Hazel went to visit friends in Kingsport and during her absence Terry rather attached himself to Anne, taking her out for rides and “seeing her home” from places. They called each other “Anne” and “Terry,” for they were about the same age, although Anne felt quite motherly towards him. Terry felt immensely flattered that “the clever Miss Shirley” seemed to like his companionship and he became so sentimental the night of May Connelly’s party, in a moonlit garden, where the shadows of the acacias blew crazily about, that Anne amusedly reminded him of the absent Hazel.
“Oh, Hazel!” said Terry. “That child!”
“You’re engaged to ‘that child,’ aren’t you?” said Anne severely.
“Not really engaged … nothing but some boy-and-girl nonsense. I … I guess I was just swept off my feet by the moonlight.”
Anne did a bit of rapid thinking. If Terry really cared so little for Hazel as this, the child was far better freed from him. Perhaps this was a heavensent opportunity to extricate them both from the silly tangle they had got themselves into and from which neither of them, taking things with all the deadly seriousness of youth, knew how to escape.
“Of