"To come back at the end of a hard day and find you! Are you happy, Annest of Annes?"
"Happy!" Anne bent to sniff a vaseful of apple blossoms Jem had set on her dressing-table. She felt surrounded and encompassed by love. "Gilbert dear, it's been lovely to be Anne of Green Gables again for a week, but it's a hundred times lovelier to come back and be Anne of Ingleside."
CHAPTER IV.
"Absolutely not," said Dr. Blythe, in a tone Jem understood.
Jem knew there was no hope of Dad's changing his mind or that Mother would try to change it for him. It was plain to be seen that on this point Mother and Dad were as one. Jem's hazel eyes darkened with anger and disappointment as he looked at his cruel parents … glared at them … all the more glaringly that they were so maddeningly indifferent to his glares and went on eating their supper as if nothing at all were wrong and out of joint. Of course Aunt Mary Maria noticed his glares … nothing ever escaped Aunt Mary Maria's mournful, pale-blue eyes … but she only seemed amused at them.
Bertie Shakespeare Drew had been up playing with Jem all the afternoon … Walter having gone down to the old House of Dreams to play with Kenneth and Persis Ford … and Bertie Shakespeare had told Jem that all the Glen boys were going down to the Harbour Mouth that evening to see Captain Bill Taylor tatoo a snake on his cousin Joe Drew's arm. He, Bertie Shakespeare, was going and wouldn't Jem come too? It would be such fun. Jem was at once crazy to go; and now he had been told that it was utterly out of the question.
"For one reason among many," said Dad, "it's much too far for you to go down to the Harbour Mouth with those boys. They won't get back till late and your bedtime is supposed to be at eight, son."
"I was sent to bed at seven every night of my life when I was a child," said Aunt Mary Maria.
"You must wait till you are older, Jem, before you go so far away in the evenings," said Mother.
"You said that last week," cried Jem indignantly, "and I am older now. You'd think I was a baby! Bertie's going and I'm just as old as him."
"There's measles around," said Aunt Mary Maria darkly. "You might catch measles, James."
Jem hated to be called James. And she always did it.
"I want to catch measles," he muttered rebelliously. Then, catching Dad's eye instead, subsided. Dad would never let anyone "talk back" to Aunt Mary Maria. Jem hated Aunt Mary Maria. Aunt Diana and Aunt Marilla were such ducks of aunts but an aunt like Aunt Mary Maria was something wholly new in Jem's experience.
"All right," he said defiantly, looking at Mother so that nobody could suppose he was talking to Aunt Mary Maria, "if you don't want to love me you don't have to. But will you like it if I just go away 'n' shoot tigers in Africa?"
"There are no tigers in Africa, dear," said Mother gently.
"Lions, then!" shouted Jem. They were determined to put him in the wrong, were they? They were bound to laugh at him, were they? He'd show them! "You can't say there's no lions in Africa. There's millions of lions in Africa. Africa's just full of lions!"
Mother and Father only smiled again, much to Aunt Mary Maria's disapproval. Impatience in children should never be condoned.
"Meanwhile," said Susan, torn between her love for and sympathy with Little Jem and her conviction that Dr. and Mrs. Dr. were perfectly right in refusing to let him go away down to the Harbour Mouth with that village gang to that disreputable, drunken old Captain Bill Taylor's place, "here is your gingerbread and whipped cream, Jem dear."
Gingerbread and whipped cream was Jem's favourite dessert. But tonight it had no charm to soothe his stormy soul.
"I don't want any!" he said sulkily. He got up and marched away from the table, turning at the door to hurl a final defiance.
"I ain't going to bed till nine o'clock, anyhow. And when I'm grown up I'm never going to bed. I'm going to stay up all night … every night … and get tattooed all over. I'm just going to be as bad as bad can be. You'll see."
"'I'm not' would be so much better than 'ain't,' dear," said Mother.
Could nothing make them feel?
"I suppose nobody wants my opinion, Annie, but if I had talked to my parents like that when I was a child I would have been whipped within an inch of my life," said Aunt Mary Maria. "I think it is a great pity the birch rod is so neglected now in some homes."
"Little Jem is not to blame," snapped Susan, seeing that Dr. and Mrs. Dr. were not going to say anything. But if Mary Maria Blythe was going to get away with that, she, Susan would know the reason why. "Bertie Shakespeare Drew put him up to it, filling him up with what fun it would be to see Joe Drew tatooed. He was here all the afternoon and sneaked into the kitchen and took the best aluminum saucepan to use as a helmet. Said they were playing soldiers. Then they made boats out of shingles and got soaked to the bone sailing them in the Hollow brook. And after that they went hopping about the yard for a solid hour, making the weirdest noises, pretending they were frogs. Frogs! No wonder Little Jem is tired out and not himself. He is the best-behaved child that ever lived when he is not worn to a frazzle, and that you may tie to."
Aunt Mary Maria said nothing aggravatingly. She never talked to Susan Baker at meal-times, thus expressing her disapproval over Susan being allowed to "sit with the family" at all.
Anne and Susan had thrashed that out before Aunt Mary Maria had come. Susan, who "knew her place," never sat or expected to sit with the family when there was company at Ingleside.
"But Aunt Mary Maria isn't company," said Anne. "She's just one of the family … and so are you, Susan."
In the end Susan gave in, not without a secret satisfaction that Mary Maria Blythe would see that she was no common hired girl. Susan had never met Aunt Mary Maria, but a niece of Susan's, the daughter of her sister Matilda, had worked for her in Charlottetown and had told Susan all about her.
"I am not going to pretend to you, Susan, that I'm overjoyed at the prospect of a visit from Aunt Mary Maria, especially just now," said Anne frankly. "But she has written Gilbert asking if she may come for a few weeks … and you know how the doctor is about such things… ."
"As he has a perfect right to be," said Susan staunchly. "What is a man to do but stand by his own flesh and blood? But as for a few weeks … well, Mrs. Dr. dear, I do not want to look on the dark side of things … but my sister Matilda's sister-in-law came to visit her for a few weeks and stayed for twenty years."
"I don't think we need dread anything like that, Susan," smiled Anne. "Aunt Mary Maria has a very nice home of her own in Charlottetown. But she is finding it very big and lonely. Her mother died two years ago, you know … she was eighty-five and Aunt Mary Maria was very good to her and misses her very much. Let's make her visit as pleasant as we can, Susan."
"I will do what in me lies, Mrs. Dr. dear. Of course we must put another board in the table, but after all is said and done it is better to be lengthening the table than shortening it down."
"We mustn't have flowers on the table, Susan, because I understand they give her asthma. And pepper makes her sneeze, so we'd better not have it. She is subject to frequent bad headaches, too, so we must really try not to be noisy."
"Good grief! Well, I have never noticed you and the doctor making much noise. And if I want to yell I can go to the middle of the maple bush; but if our poor children have to keep quiet all the time because of Mary Maria Blythe's headaches … you will excuse me for saying I think it is going a little too far, Mrs. Dr. dear."
"It's just for a few weeks, Susan."
"Let us hope so. Oh, well, Mrs. Dr. dear, we just have to take the lean streaks