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.”
“Yes, I think she will,” said Anne.
“Oh, Anne,” protested Diana, with a rather shocked smile.
“Well, why not, Diana?” asked Anne seriously. “Do you think we’ll never laugh in heaven?”
“Oh — I — I don’t know” floundered Diana. “It doesn’t seem just right, somehow. You know it’s rather dreadful to laugh in church.”
“But heaven won’t be like church — all the time,” said Anne.
“I hope it ain’t,” said Davy emphatically. “If it is I don’t want to go. Church is awful dull. Anyway, I don’t mean to go for ever so long. I mean to live to be a hundred years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands. He says he’s lived so long ‘cause he always smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs. Can I smoke tobacco pretty soon, Anne?”
“No, Davy, I hope you’ll never use tobacco,” said Anne absently.
“What’ll you feel like if the germs kill me then?” demanded Davy.
Chapter XV.
A Dream Turned Upside Down
“Just one more week and we go back to Redmond,” said Anne. She was happy at the thought of returning to work, classes and Redmond friends. Pleasing visions were also being woven around Patty’s Place. There was a warm pleasant sense of home in the thought of it, even though she had never lived there.
But the summer had been a very happy one, too — a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently, to play more heartily.
“All life lessons are not learned at college,” she thought. “Life teaches them everywhere.”
But alas, the final week of that pleasant vacation was spoiled for Anne, by one of those impish happenings which are like a dream turned upside down.
“Been writing any more stories lately?” inquired Mr. Harrison genially one evening when Anne was taking tea with him and Mrs. Harrison.
“No,” answered Anne, rather crisply.
“Well, no offense meant. Mrs. Hiram Sloane told me the other day that a big envelope addressed to the Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Company of Montreal had been dropped into the post office box a month ago, and she suspicioned that somebody was trying for the prize they’d offered for the best story that introduced the name of their baking powder. She said it wasn’t addressed in your writing, but I thought maybe it was you.”
“Indeed, no! I saw the prize offer, but I’d never dream of competing for it. I think it would be perfectly disgraceful to write a story to advertise a baking powder. It would be almost as bad as Judson Parker’s patent medicine fence.”
So spake Anne loftily, little dreaming of the valley of humiliation awaiting her. That very evening Diana popped into the porch gable, bright-eyed and rosy cheeked, carrying a letter.
“Oh, Anne, here’s a letter for you. I was at the office, so I thought I’d bring it along. Do open it quick. If it is what I believe it is I shall just be wild with delight.” Anne, puzzled, opened the letter and glanced over the typewritten contents.
Miss Anne Shirley,
Green Gables,
Avonlea, P.E. Island.
“DEAR MADAM: We have much pleasure in informing you that your charming story ‘Averil’s Atonement’ has won the prize of twenty-five dollars offered in our recent competition. We enclose the check herewith. We are arranging for the publication of the story in several prominent Canadian newspapers, and we also intend to have it printed in pamphlet form for distribution among our patrons. Thanking you for the interest you have shown in our enterprise, we remain,
“Yours very truly,
“THE ROLLINGS RELIABLE
“BAKING POWDER Co.”
“I don’t understand,” said Anne, blankly.
Diana clapped her hands.
“Oh, I KNEW it would win the prize — I was sure of it. I sent your story into the competition, Anne.”
“Diana — Barry!”
“Yes, I did,” said Diana gleefully, perching herself on the bed. “When I saw the offer I thought of your story in a minute, and at first I thought I’d ask you to send it in. But then I was afraid you wouldn’t — you had so little faith left in it. So I just decided I’d send the copy you gave me, and say nothing about it. Then, if it didn’t win the prize, you’d never know and you wouldn’t feel badly over it, because the stories that failed were not to be returned, and if it did you’d have such a delightful surprise.”
Diana was not the most discerning of mortals, but just at this moment it struck her that Anne was not looking exactly overjoyed. The surprise was there, beyond doubt — but where was the delight?
“Why, Anne, you don’t seem a bit pleased!” she exclaimed.
Anne instantly manufactured a smile and put it on.
“Of course I couldn’t be anything but pleased over your unselfish wish to give me pleasure,” she said slowly. “But you know — I’m so amazed — I can’t realize it — and I don’t understand. There wasn’t a word in my story about — about—” Anne choked a little over the word—”baking powder.”
“Oh, I put that in,” said Diana, reassured. “It was as easy as wink — and of course my experience in our old Story Club helped me. You know the scene where Averil makes the cake? Well, I just stated that she used the Rollings Reliable in it,