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.”
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.”
