Mr. Harrison had brought the mail, and merry letters from Stella and Priscilla and Phil soon dissipated Anne’s blues.  Aunt Jamesina, too, had written, saying that she was keeping the hearth-fire alight, and that the cats were all well, and the house plants doing fine.

“The weather has been real cold,” she wrote, “so I let the cats sleep in the house—­Rusty and Joseph on the sofa in the living-room, and the Sarah-cat on the foot of my bed.  It’s real company to hear her purring when I wake up in the night and think of my poor daughter in the foreign field.  If it was anywhere but in India I wouldn’t worry, but they say the snakes out there are terrible.  It takes all the Sarah-cats’s purring to drive away the thought of those snakes.  I have enough faith for everything but the snakes.  I can’t think why Providence ever made them.  Sometimes I don’t think He did.  I’m inclined to believe the Old Harry had a hand in making them.”

Anne had left a thin, typewritten communication till the last, thinking it unimportant.  When she had read it she sat very still, with tears in her eyes.

“What is the matter, Anne?” asked Marilla.

“Miss Josephine Barry is dead,” said Anne, in a low tone.

“So she has gone at last,” said Marilla.  “Well, she has been sick for over a year, and the Barrys have been expecting to hear of her death any time.  It is well she is at rest for she has suffered dreadfully, Anne.  She was always kind to you.”

“She has been kind to the last, Marilla.  This letter is from her lawyer.  She has left me a thousand dollars in her will.”

“Gracious, ain’t that an awful lot of money,” exclaimed Davy.  “She’s the woman you and Diana lit on when you jumped into the spare room bed, ain’t she?  Diana told me that story.  Is that why she left you so much?”

“Hush, Davy,” said Anne gently.  She slipped away to the porch gable with a full heart, leaving Marilla and Mrs. Lynde to talk over the news to their hearts’ content.

“Do you s’pose Anne will ever get married now?” speculated Davy anxiously.  “When Dorcas Sloane got married last summer she said if she’d had enough money to live on she’d never have been bothered with a man, but even a widower with eight children was better’n living with a sister-in-law.”

“Davy Keith, do hold your tongue,” said Mrs. Rachel severely.  “The way you talk is scandalous for a small boy, that’s what.”

Chapter XIX

An Interlude

“To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I’ve left my teens behind me forever,” said Anne, who was curled up on the hearth-rug with Rusty in her lap, to Aunt Jamesina who was reading in her pet chair.  They were alone in the living room.  Stella and Priscilla had gone to a committee meeting and Phil was upstairs adorning herself for a party.

“I suppose you feel kind of, sorry” said Aunt Jamesina.  “The teens are such a nice part of life.  I’m glad I’ve never gone out of them myself.”