“I must.  I have some sewing to do for Dora this evening.  Besides, Davy is probably breaking Marilla’s heart with some new mischief by this time.  This morning the first thing he said was, ’Where does the dark go, Anne?  I want to know.’  I told him it went around to the other side of the world but after breakfast he declared it didn’t . . . that it went down the well.  Marilla says she caught him hanging over the well-box four times today, trying to reach down to the dark.”

“He’s a limb,” declared Mr. Harrison.  “He came over here yesterday and pulled six feathers out of Ginger’s tail before I could get in from the barn.  The poor bird has been moping ever since.  Those children must be a sight of trouble to you folks.”

“Everything that’s worth having is some trouble,” said Anne, secretly resolving to forgive Davy’s next offence, whatever it might be, since he had avenged her on Ginger.

Mr. Roger Pye brought the hall paint home that night and Mr. Joshua Pye, a surly, taciturn man, began painting the next day.  He was not disturbed in his task.  The hall was situated on what was called “the lower road.”  In late autumn this road was always muddy and wet, and people going to Carmody traveled by the longer “upper” road.  The hall was so closely surrounded by fir woods that it was invisible unless you were near it.  Mr. Joshua Pye painted away in the solitude and independence that were so dear to his unsociable heart.

Friday afternoon he finished his job and went home to Carmody.  Soon after his departure Mrs. Rachel Lynde drove by, having braved the mud of the lower road out of curiosity to see what the hall looked like in its new coat of paint.  When she rounded the spruce curve she saw.

The sight affected Mrs. Lynde oddly.  She dropped the reins, held up her hands, and said “Gracious Providence!” She stared as if she could not believe her eyes.  Then she laughed almost hysterically.

“There must be some mistake . . . there must.  I knew those Pyes would make a mess of things.”

Mrs. Lynde drove home, meeting several people on the road and stopping to tell them about the hall.  The news flew like wildfire.  Gilbert Blythe, poring over a text book at home, heard it from his father’s hired boy at sunset, and rushed breathlessly to Green Gables, joined on the way by Fred Wright.  They found Diana Barry, Jane Andrews, and Anne Shirley, despair personified, at the yard gate of Green Gables, under the big leafless willows.

“It isn’t true surely, Anne?” exclaimed Gilbert.

“It is true,” answered Anne, looking like the muse of tragedy.  “Mrs. Lynde called on her way from Carmody to tell me.  Oh, it is simply dreadful!  What is the use of trying to improve anything?”

“What is dreadful?” asked Oliver Sloane, arriving at this moment with a bandbox he had brought from town for Marilla.