“Yes, ma’am, so do I. That’s just exactly how I feel too, ma’am,” agreed Charlotta the Fourth, who would have said precisely the same thing if Anne had remarked that she felt like a pelican of the wilderness.  Always after Anne had visited Echo Lodge Charlotta the Fourth mounted to her little room over the kitchen and tried before her looking glass to speak and look and move like Anne.  Charlotta could never flatter herself that she quite succeeded; but practice makes perfect, as Charlotta had learned at school, and she fondly hoped that in time she might catch the trick of that dainty uplift of chin, that quick, starry outflashing of eyes, that fashion of walking as if you were a bough swaying in the wind.  It seemed so easy when you watched Anne.  Charlotta the Fourth admired Anne wholeheartedly.  It was not that she thought her so very handsome.  Diana Barry’s beauty of crimson cheek and black curls was much more to Charlotta the Fourth’s taste than Anne’s moonshine charm of luminous gray eyes and the pale, everchanging roses of her cheeks.

“But I’d rather look like you than be pretty,” she told Anne sincerely.

Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the sting.  She was used to taking her compliments mixed.  Public opinion never agreed on Anne’s looks.  People who had heard her called handsome met her and were disappointed.  People who had heard her called plain saw her and wondered where other people’s eyes were.  Anne herself would never believe that she had any claim to beauty.  When she looked in the glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the nose thereof.  Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive, ever-varying play of feeling that came and went over her features like a rosy illuminating flame, or the charm of dream and laughter alternating in her big eyes.

While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities.  Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her. . . the power of future development that was in her.  She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.

As they picked, Charlotta the Fourth confided to Anne her fears regarding Miss Lavendar.  The warm-hearted little handmaiden was honestly worried over her adored mistress’ condition.

“Miss Lavendar isn’t well, Miss Shirley, ma’am.  I’m sure she isn’t, though she never complains.  She hasn’t seemed like herself this long while, ma’am . . . not since that day you and Paul were here together before.  I feel sure she caught cold that night, ma’am.  After you and him had gone she went out and walked in the garden for long after dark with nothing but