"I suppose so," said Diana doubtfully. "I've never been there since I was married. Anne Cordelia explores a lot … but I always tell her she mustn't go too far from home. She loves prowling about the woods … and one day when I scolded her for talking to herself in the garden she said she wasn't talking to herself … she was talking to the spirit of the flowers. You know that dolls' tea-set with the tiny pink rosebuds you sent her for her ninth birthday. There isn't a piece broken … she's so careful. She only uses it when the Three Green People come to tea with her. I can't get out of her who she thinks they are. I declare in some ways, Anne, she's far more like you than she is like me."
"Perhaps there's more in a name than Shakespeare allowed. Don't grudge Anne Cordelia her fancies, Diana. I'm always sorry for children who don't spend a few years in fairyland."
"Olivia Sloane is our teacher now," said Diana doubtfully. "She's a B.A., you know, and just took the school for a year to be near her mother. She says children should be made to face realities."
"Have I lived to hear you taking up with Sloanishness, Diana Wright?"
"No … no … NO! I don't like her a bit. … She has such round staring blue eyes like all that clan. And I don't mind Anne Cordelia's fancies. They're pretty … just like yours used to be. I guess she'll get enough 'reality' as life goes on."
"Well, it's settled then. Come down to Green Gables about two and we'll have a drink of Marilla's red currant wine … she makes it now and then in spite of the minister and Mrs. Lynde … just to make us feel real devilish."
"Do you remember the day you set me drunk on it?" giggled Diana, who did not mind "devilish" as she would if anybody but Anne used it. Everybody knew Anne didn't really mean things like that. It was just her way.
"We'll have a real do-you-remember day tomorrow, Diana. I won't keep you any longer … there's Fred coming with the buggy. Your dress is lovely."
"Fred made me get a new one for the wedding. I didn't feel we could afford it since we built the new barn, but he said he wasn't going to have his wife looking like someone that was sent for and couldn't go when everybody else would be dressed within an inch of her life. Wasn't that just like a man?"
"Oh, you sound just like Mrs. Elliott at the Glen," said Anne severely. "You want to watch that tendency. Would you like to live in a world where there were no men?"
"It would be horrible," admitted Diana. "Yes, yes, Fred, I'm coming. Oh, all right! Till tomorrow then, Anne."
Anne paused by the Dryad's Bubble on her way back. She loved that old brook so. Every trill of her childhood's laughter that it had ever caught, it had held and now seemed to give out again to her listening ears. Her old dreams … she could see them reflected in the clear Bubble … old vows … old whispers … the brook kept them all and murmured of them … but there was no one to listen save the wise old spruces in the Haunted Wood that had been listening so long.
CHAPTER II.
"Such a lovely day … made for us," said Diana. "I'm afraid it's a pet day, though … there'll be rain tomorrow."
"Never mind. We'll drink its beauty today, even if its sunshine is gone tomorrow. We'll enjoy each other's friendship today even if we are to be parted tomorrow. Look at those long, golden-green hills … those mist-blue valleys. They're ours, Diana … I don't care if that furthest hill is registered in Abner Sloan's name … it's ours today. There's a west wind blowing … I always feel adventurous when a west wind blows … and we're going to have a perfect ramble."
They had. All the old dear spots were revisited: Lover's Lane, the Haunted Wood, Idlewild, Violet Vale, the Birch Path, Crystal Lake. There were some changes. The little ring of birch saplings in Idlewild, where they had had a playhouse long ago, had grown into big trees; the Birch Path, long untrodden, was matted with bracken; the Crystal Lake had entirely disappeared, leaving only a damp mossy hollow. But Violet Vale was purple with violets and the seedling apple tree Gilbert had once found far back in the woods was a huge tree peppered over with tiny, crimson-tipped blossom-buds.
They walked bareheaded. Annie's hair still gleamed like polished mahogany in the sunlight and Diana's was still glossy black. They exchanged gay and understanding, warm and friendly, glances. Sometimes they walked in silence … Anne always maintained that two people as sympathetic as she and Diana could feel each other's thoughts. Sometimes they peppered their conversation with do-you-remembers. "Do you remember the day you fell through the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road?" … "Do you remember when we jumped on Aunt Josephine?" … "Do you remember our Story Club?" … "Do you remember Mrs. Morgan's visit when you stained your nose red?" … "Do you remember how we signalled to each other from our windows with candles?" … "Do you remember the fun we had at Miss Lavender's wedding and Charlotta's blue bows?" … "Do you remember the Improvement Society?" It almost seemed to them they could hear their old peals of laughter echoing down the years.
The A.V.I.S. was, it seemed, dead. It had petered out soon after Anne's marriage.
"They just couldn't keep it up, Anne. The young people in Avonlea now are not what they were in our day."
"Don't talk as if 'our day' were ended, Diana. We're only fifteen years old and kindred spirits. The air isn't just full of light … it is light. I'm not sure that I haven't sprouted wings."
"I feel just that way, too," said Diana, forgetting that she had tipped the scale at one hundred and fifty-five that morning. "I often feel that I'd love to be turned into a bird for a little while. It must be wonderful to fly."
Beauty was all around them. Unsuspected tintings glimmered in the dark demesnes of the woods and glowed in their alluring by-ways. The spring sunshine sifted through the young green leaves. Gay trills of song were everywhere. There were little hollows where you felt as if you were bathing in a pool of liquid gold. At every turn some fresh spring scent struck their faces … spice ferns … fir balsam … the wholesome odour of newly ploughed fields. There was a lane curtained with wild-cherry blossoms … a grassy old field full of tiny spruce trees just starting in life and looking like elvish things that had squatted down among the grasses … brooks not yet "too broad for leaping" … star-flowers under the firs … sheets of curly young ferns … and a birch tree whence some vandal had torn away the white-skin wrapper in several places, exposing the tints of the bark below. Anne looked at it so long that Diana wondered. She did not see what Anne did … tints ranging from purest creamy white, through exquisite golden tones, growing deeper and deeper until the inmost layer revealed the deepest richest brown as if to tell that all birches, so maiden-like and cool exteriorly, had yet warm-hued feelings.
"The primeval fire of earth at their hearts," murmured Anne.
And finally, after traversing a little wood glen full of toadstools, they found Hester Gray's garden. Not so much changed. It was still very sweet with dear flowers. There were still plenty of June lilies, as Diana called the narcissi. The row of cherry trees had grown older but was a drift of snowy bloom. You could still find the central rose walk, and the old dyke was white with strawberry blossoms and blue with violets and green with baby fern. They ate their picnic supper in a corner of it, sitting on some old mossy stones, with a lilac tree behind them flinging purple banners against a low-hanging sun. Both were hungry and both did justice to their own good cooking.
"How nice things taste out of doors!" sighed Diana comfortably. "That chocolate cake of yours, Anne … well, words fail me, but I must get the recipe. Fred would adore it. He can eat anything and stay thin. I'm always saying I'm not going to eat any more cake … because I'm getting fatter every year. I've such a horror of getting like great-aunt Sarah … she was so fat she always had to be pulled up when she had sat down. But when I see a cake like that … and last night at the reception … well, they would all have been so offended if I didn't eat."
"Did you have a nice time?"
"Oh, yes, in a way. But I fell into Fred's Cousin Henrietta's