Echo Lodge was the scene of gaieties once more, and the echoes over the river were kept busy mimicking the laughter that rang in the old garden behind the spruces.
“Miss Lavendar” had not changed, except to grow even sweeter and prettier. Paul adored her, and the companionship between them was beautiful to see.
“But I don’t call her ‘mother’ just by itself,” he explained to Anne. “You see, that name belongs just to my own little mother, and I can’t give it to any one else. You know, teacher. But I call her ‘Mother Lavendar’ and I love her next best to father. I—I even love her a little better than you, teacher.”
“Which is just as it ought to be,” answered Anne.
Paul was thirteen now and very tall for his years. His face and eyes were as beautiful as ever, and his fancy was still like a prism, separating everything that fell upon it into rainbows. He and Anne had delightful rambles to wood and field and shore. Never were there two more thoroughly “kindred spirits.”
Charlotta the Fourth had blossomed out into young ladyhood. She wore her hair now in an enormous pompador and had discarded the blue ribbon bows of auld lang syne, but her face was as freckled, her nose as snubbed, and her mouth and smiles as wide as ever.
“You don’t think I talk with a Yankee accent, do you, Miss Shirley, ma’am?” she demanded anxiously.
“I don’t notice it, Charlotta.”
“I’m real glad of that. They said I did at home, but I thought likely they just wanted to aggravate me. I don’t want no Yankee accent. Not that I’ve a word to say against the Yankees, Miss Shirley, ma’am. They’re real civilized. But give me old P.E. Island every time.”
Paul spent his first fortnight with his grandmother Irving in Avonlea. Anne was there to meet him when he came, and found him wild with eagerness to get to the shore—Nora and the Golden Lady and the Twin Sailors would be there. He could hardly wait to eat his supper. Could he not see Nora’s elfin face peering around the point, watching for him wistfully? But it was a very sober Paul who came back from the shore in the twilight.