her brilliancy won admiration.  Nor did she monopolize the conversation.  She could draw others out as skillfully and fully as she could talk herself, and Anne and Diana found themselves chattering freely to her.  Mrs. Pendexter said little; she merely smiled with her lovely eyes and lips, and ate chicken and fruit cake and preserves with such exquisite grace that she conveyed the impression of dining on ambrosia and honeydew.  But then, as Anne said to Diana later on, anybody so divinely beautiful as Mrs. Pendexter didn’t need to talk; it was enough for her just to look.

After dinner they all had a walk through Lover’s Lane and Violet Vale and the Birch Path, then back through the Haunted Wood to the Dryad’s Bubble, where they sat down and talked for a delightful last half hour.  Mrs. Morgan wanted to know how the Haunted Wood came by its name, and laughed until she cried when she heard the story and Anne’s dramatic account of a certain memorable walk through it at the witching hour of twilight.

“It has indeed been a feast of reason and flow of soul, hasn’t it?” said Anne, when her guests had gone and she and Diana were alone again.  “I don’t know which I enjoyed more . . . listening to Mrs. Morgan or gazing at Mrs. Pendexter.  I believe we had a nicer time than if we’d known they were coming and been cumbered with much serving.  You must stay to tea with me, Diana, and we’ll talk it all over.”

“Priscilla says Mrs. Pendexter’s husband’s sister is married to an English earl; and yet she took a second helping of the plum preserves,” said Diana, as if the two facts were somehow incompatible.

“I daresay even the English earl himself wouldn’t have turned up his aristocratic nose at Marilla’s plum preserves,” said Anne proudly.

Anne did not mention the misfortune which had befallen her nose when she related the day’s history to Marilla that evening.  But she took the bottle of freckle lotion and emptied it out of the window.

“I shall never try any beautifying messes again,” she said, darkly resolute.  “They may do for careful, deliberate people; but for anyone so hopelessly given over to making mistakes as I seem to be it’s tempting fate to meddle with them.”

XXI

Sweet Miss Lavendar

School opened and Anne returned to her work, with fewer theories but considerably more experience.  She had several new pupils, six- and seven-year-olds just venturing, round-eyed, into a world of wonder.  Among them were Davy and Dora.  Davy sat with Milty Boulter, who had been going to school for a year and was therefore quite a man of the world.  Dora had made a compact at Sunday School the previous Sunday to sit with Lily Sloane; but Lily Sloane not coming the first day, she was temporarily assigned to Mirabel Cotton, who was ten years old and therefore, in Dora’s eyes, one of the “big girls.”