“I think school is great fun,” Davy told Marilla when he got home that night.  “You said I’d find it hard to sit still and I did . . . you mostly do tell the truth, I notice . . . but you can wriggle your legs about under the desk and that helps a lot.  It’s splendid to have so many boys to play with.  I sit with Milty Boulter and he’s fine.  He’s longer than me but I’m wider.  It’s nicer to sit in the back seats but you can’t sit there till your legs grow long enough to touch the floor.  Milty drawed a picture of Anne on his slate and it was awful ugly and I told him if he made pictures of Anne like that I’d lick him at recess.  I thought first I’d draw one of him and put horns and a tail on it, but I was afraid it would hurt his feelings, and Anne says you should never hurt anyone’s feelings.  It seems it’s dreadful to have your feelings hurt.  It’s better to knock a boy down than hurt his feelings if you must do something.  Milty said he wasn’t scared of me but he’d just as soon call it somebody else to ’blige me, so he rubbed out Anne’s name and printed Barbara Shaw’s under it.  Milty doesn’t like Barbara ’cause she calls him a sweet little boy and once she patted him on his head.”

Dora said primly that she liked school; but she was very quiet, even for her; and when at twilight Marilla bade her go upstairs to bed she hesitated and began to cry.

“I’m . . .  I’m frightened,” she sobbed.  “I . . .  I don’t want to go upstairs alone in the dark.”

“What notion have you got into your head now?” demanded Marilla.  “I’m sure you’ve gone to bed alone all summer and never been frightened before.”

Dora still continued to cry, so Anne picked her up, cuddled her sympathetically, and whispered,

“Tell Anne all about it, sweetheart.  What are you frightened of?”

“Of . . . of Mirabel Cotton’s uncle,” sobbed Dora.  “Mirabel Cotton told me all about her family today in school.  Nearly everybody in her family has died . . . all her grandfathers and grandmothers and ever so many uncles and aunts.  They have a habit of dying, Mirabel says.  Mirabel’s awful proud of having so many dead relations, and she told me what they all died of, and what they said, and how they looked in their coffins.  And Mirabel says one of her uncles was seen walking around the house after he was buried.  Her mother saw him.  I don’t mind the rest so much but I can’t help thinking about that uncle.”

Anne went upstairs with Dora and sat by her until she fell asleep.  The next day Mirabel Cotton was kept in at recess and “gently but firmly” given to understand that when you were so unfortunate as to possess an uncle who persisted in walking about houses after he had been decently interred it was not in good taste to talk about that eccentric gentleman to your deskmate of tender years.  Mirabel thought this very harsh.  The Cottons had not much to boast of.  How was she to keep up her prestige among her schoolmates if she were forbidden to make capital out of the family ghost?