“So you had tea at the stone house with Lavendar Lewis?” said Marilla at the breakfast table next morning. “What is she like now? It’s over fifteen years since I saw her last . . . it was one Sunday in Grafton church. I suppose she has changed a great deal. Davy Keith, when you want something you can’t reach, ask to have it passed and don’t spread yourself over the table in that fashion. Did you ever see Paul Irving doing that when he was here to meals?” “But Paul’s arms are longer’n mine,” brumbled Davy. “They’ve had eleven years to grow and mine’ve only had seven. ‘Sides, I DID ask, but you and Anne was so busy talking you didn’t pay any ‘tention. ‘Sides, Paul’s never been here to any meal escept tea, and it’s easier to be p’lite at tea than at breakfast. You ain’t half as hungry. It’s an awful long while between supper and breakfast. Now, Anne, that spoonful ain’t any bigger than it was last year and I’M ever so much bigger.”
“Of course, I don’t know what Miss Lavendar used to look like but I don’t fancy somehow that she has changed a great deal,” said Anne, after she had helped Davy to maple syrup, giving him two spoonfuls to pacify him. “Her hair is snow-white but her face is fresh and almost girlish, and she has the sweetest brown eyes . . . such a pretty shade of wood-brown with little golden glints in them . . . and her voice makes you think of white satin and tinkling water and fairy bells all mixed up together.”
“She was reckoned a great beauty when she was a girl,” said Marilla. “I never knew her very well but I liked her as far as I did know her. Some folks thought her peculiar even then. DAVY, if ever I catch you at such a trick again you’ll be made to wait for your meals till everyone else is done, like the French.”
Most conversations between Anne and Marilla in the presence of the twins, were punctuated by these rebukes Davy-ward. In this instance, Davy, sad to relate, not being able to scoop up the last drops of his syrup with his spoon, had solved the difficulty by lifting his plate in both hands and applying his small pink tongue to it. Anne looked at him with such horrified eyes that the little sinner turned red and said, half shamefacedly, half defiantly,
“There ain’t any wasted that way.”
“People who are different from other people are always called peculiar,” said Anne. “And Miss Lavendar is certainly different, though it’s hard to say just where the difference comes in. Perhaps it is because she is one of those people who never grow old.”
“One might as well grow old when all your generation do,” said Marilla, rather reckless of her pronouns. “If you don’t, you don’t fit in anywhere. Far as I can learn Lavendar Lewis has just dropped out of everything. She’s lived in that out of the way place until everybody has forgotten her. That stone house is one of the oldest on the Island. Old Mr. Lewis built it eighty years ago when he came out from England. Davy, stop joggling Dora’s elbow. Oh, I saw you! You needn’t try to look innocent. What does make you behave so this morning?”
“Maybe I got out of the wrong side of the bed,” suggested Davy. “Milty Boulter says if you do that things are bound to go wrong with you all day. His grandmother told him. But which is the right side? And what are you to do when your bed’s against the wall? I want to know.”
“I’ve always wondered what went wrong between Stephen Irving and Lavendar Lewis,” continued Marilla, ignoring Davy. “They were certainly engaged twenty-five years ago and then all at once it was broken off. I don’t know what the trouble was but it must have been something terrible, for he went away to the States and never come home since.”
“Perhaps it was nothing very dreadful after all. I think the little things in life often make more trouble than the big things,” said Anne, with one of those flashes of insight which experience could not have bettered. “Marilla, please don’t say anything about my being at Miss Lavendar’s to Mrs. Lynde. She’d be sure to ask a hundred questions and somehow I wouldn’t like it . . . nor Miss Lavendar either if she knew, I feel sure.”
“I daresay Rachel would be curious,” admitted Marilla, “though she hasn’t as much time as she used to have for looking after other people’s affairs. She’s tied home now on account of Thomas; and she’s feeling pretty downhearted, for I think she’s beginn............