I’m awfully sorry I made fun of your hair that time.
I didn’t mean to vex you and I only meant it for a joke.
Besides, it’s so long ago.
I think your hair is awfully pretty now—honest I do.
Let’s be friends.”
For a moment Anne hesitated.
She had an odd, newly awakened consciousness under all her outraged dignity that the half-shy, half-eager expression in Gilbert’s hazel eyes was something that was very good to see.
Her heart gave a quick, queer little beat.
But the bitterness of her old grievance promptly stiffened up her wavering determination.
That scene of two years before flashed back into her recollection as vividly as if it had taken place yesterday.
Gilbert had called her “carrots” and had brought about her disgrace before the whole school.
Her resentment, which to other and older people might be as laughable as its cause, was in no whit allayed and softened by time seemingly.
She hated Gilbert Blythe!
She would never forgive him!
“No,” she said coldly,
“I shall never be friends with you, Gilbert Blythe; and I don’t want to be!”
“All right!”
Gilbert sprang into his skiff with an angry color in his cheeks.
“I’ll never ask you to be friends again, Anne Shirley.
And I don’t care either!”
He pulled away with swift defiant strokes, and Anne went up the steep, ferny little path under the maples.
She held her head very high, but she was conscious of an odd feeling of regret.
She almost wished she had answered Gilbert differently.
Of course, he had insulted her terribly, but still—!
Altogether, Anne rather thought it would be a relief to sit down and have a good cry.
She was really quite unstrung, for the reaction from her fright and cramped clinging was making itself felt.
Halfway up the path she met Jane and Diana rushing back to the pond in a state narrowly removed from positive frenzy.
They had found nobody at Orchard Slope, both Mr. and Mrs. Barry being away.
Here Ruby Gillis had succumbed to hysterics, and was left to recover from them as best she might, while Jane and Diana flew through the Haunted Wood and across the brook to Green Gables.
There they had found nobody either, for Marilla had gone to Carmody and Matthew was making hay in the back field.
“Oh, Anne,” gasped Diana, fairly falling on the former’s neck and weeping with relief and delight, “oh, Anne—we thought—you were—drowned—and we felt like murderers—because we had made—you be—Elaine.
And Ruby is in hysterics—oh, Anne, how did you escape?”
“I climbed up on one of the piles,” explained Anne wearily, “and Gilbert Blythe came along in Mr. Andrews’s dory and brought me to land.”
“Oh, Anne, how splendid of him!
Why, it’s so romantic!” said Jane, finding breath enough for utterance at last.
“Of course you’ll speak to him after this.”
“Of course I won’t,” flashed Anne, with a momentary return of her old spirit.
“And I don’t want ever to hear the word ‘romantic’ again, Jane Andrews.
I’m awfully sorry you were so frightened, girls.
It is all my fault.
I feel sure I was born under an unlucky star.
Everything I do gets me or my dearest friends into a scrape.
We’ve gone and lost your father’s flat, Diana, and I have a presentiment that we’ll not be allowed to row on the pond any more.”
Anne’s presentiment proved more trustworthy than presentiments are apt to do.
Great was the consternation in the Barry and Cuthbert households when the events of the afternoon became known.
“Will you ever have any sense, Anne?” groaned Marilla.
“Oh, yes, I think I will, Marilla,” returned Anne optimistically.
A good cry, indulged in the grateful solitude of the east gable, had soothed her nerves and restored her to her wonted cheerfulness.
“I think my prospects of becoming sensible are brighter now than ever.”
“I don’t see how,” said Marilla.