“After that I had just mother to live for. But I was very ambitious. I meant to teach and earn my way through college. I meant to climb to the very top—oh, I won’t talk of that either. It’s no use. You know what happened. I couldn’t see my dear little heart-broken mother, who had been such a slave all her life, turned out of her home. Of course, I could have earned enough for us to live on. But mother COULDN’T leave her home. She had come there as a bride—and she had loved father so—and all her memories were there. Even yet, Anne, when I think that I made her last year happy I’m not sorry for what I did. As for Dick—I didn’t hate him when I married him—I just felt for him the indifferent, friendly feeling I had for most of my schoolmates. I knew he drank some—but I had never heard the story of the girl down at the fishing cove. If I had, I COULDN’T have married him, even for mother’s sake. Afterwards—I DID hate him—but mother never knew. She died—and then I was alone. I was only seventeen and I was alone. Dick had gone off in the Four Sisters. I hoped he wouldn’t be home very much more. The sea had always been in his blood. I had no other hope. Well, Captain Jim brought him home, as you know—and that’s all there is to say. You know me now, Anne—the worst of me—the barriers are all down. And you still want to be my friend?”
Anne looked up through the birches, at the white paper-lantern of a half moon drifting downwards to the gulf of sunset. Her face was very sweet.
“I am your friend and you are mine, for always,” she said. “Such a friend as I never had before. I have had many dear and beloved friends—but there is a something in you, Leslie, that I never found in anyone else. You have more to offer me in that rich nature of yours, and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are both women—and friends forever.”
They clasped hands and smiled at each other through the tears that filled the gray eyes and the blue.
CHAPTER 22
MISS CORNELIA ARRANGES MATTERS
Gilbert insisted that Susan should be kept on at the little house for the summer. Anne protested at first.
“Life here with just the two of us is so sweet, Gilbert. It spoils it a little to have anyone else. Susan is a dear soul, but she is an outsider. It won’t hurt me to do the work here.”
“You must take your doctor’s advice,” said Gilbert. “There’s an old proverb to the effect that shoemakers’ wives go barefoot and doctors’ wives die young. I don’t mean that it shall be true in my household. You will keep Susan until the old spring comes back into your step, and those little hollows on your cheeks fill out.”