Anne of Green Gables: Chapters 19-27

Tinkles of sleigh bells and distant laughter, that seemed like the mirth of wood elves, came from every quarter.

Diana preserved a discreet silence, but she and Anne exchanged furtive smiles of guilty amusement across the table.

Mrs. Lynde laughed comfortably over her mild joke, but Anne remained pensive.

Spring had come once more to Green Gables — the beautiful capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth.

But Marilla was inexorable.

If Marilla, in going down to Mrs. Lynde’s that evening, was actuated by any motive save her avowed one of returning the quilting frames she had borrowed the preceding winter, it was an amiable weakness shared by most of the Avonlea people.

Matthew was there, having been inveigled into the party only goodness and Anne knew how.

Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment.

“The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’re thinking too much about yourself. You should just think of Mrs. Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable to her,” said Marilla, hitting for once in her life on a very sound and pithy piece of advice.

They had a very good time and nothing untoward happened until after tea, when they found themselves in the Barry garden, a little tired of all their games and ripe for any enticing form of mischief which might present itself.

Then Josie Pye dared Jane Andrews to hop on her left leg around the garden without stopping once or putting her right foot to the ground; which Jane Andrews gamely tried to do, but gave out at the third corner and had to confess herself defeated.

Anne climbed the ladder amid breathless silence, gained the ridgepole, balanced herself uprightly on that precarious footing, and started to walk along it, dizzily conscious that she was uncomfortably high up in the world and that walking ridgepoles was not a thing in which your imagination helped you out much.

After much cogitation Matthew resolved to go to Samuel Lawson’s store instead of William Blair’s.

Junior Avonlea found it hard to settle down to humdrum existence again.

No boys were allowed in it—although Ruby Gillis opined that their admission would make it more exciting—and each member had to produce one story a week.