“I’ve good news for you, Anne,” said Diana.  “Mother and I have just got home from Carmody, and I saw Mary Sentner from Spencer vale in Mr. Blair’s store.  She says the old Copp girls on the Tory Road have a willow-ware platter and she thinks it’s exactly like the one we had at the supper.  She says they’ll likely sell it, for Martha Copp has never been known to keep anything she could sell; but if they won’t there’s a platter at Wesley Keyson’s at Spencervale and she knows they’d sell it, but she isn’t sure it’s just the same kind as Aunt Josephine’s.”

“I’ll go right over to Spencervale after it tomorrow,” said Anne resolutely, “and you must come with me.  It will be such a weight off my mind, for I have to go to town day after tomorrow and how can I face your Aunt Josephine without a willow-ware platter?  It would be even worse than the time I had to confess about jumping on the spare room bed.”

Both girls laughed over the old memory . . . concerning which, if any of my readers are ignorant and curious, I must refer them to Anne’s earlier history.

The next afternoon the girls fared forth on their platter hunting expedition.  It was ten miles to Spencervale and the day was not especially pleasant for traveling.  It was very warm and windless, and the dust on the road was such as might have been expected after six weeks of dry weather.

“Oh, I do wish it would rain soon,” sighed Anne.  “Everything is so parched up.  The poor fields just seem pitiful to me and the trees seem to be stretching out their hands pleading for rain.  As for my garden, it hurts me every time I go into it.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain about a garden when the farmers’ crops are suffering so.  Mr. Harrison says his pastures are so scorched up that his poor cows can hardly get a bite to eat and he feels guilty of cruelty to animals every time he meets their eyes.”

After a wearisome drive the girls reached Spencervale and turned down the “Tory” Road . . . a green, solitary highway where the strips of grass between the wheel tracks bore evidence to lack of travel.  Along most of its extent it was lined with thick-set young spruces crowding down to the roadway, with here and there a break where the back field of a Spencervale farm came out to the fence or an expanse of stumps was aflame with fireweed and goldenrod.

“Why is it called the Tory Road?” asked Anne.

“Mr. Allan says it is on the principle of calling a place a grove because there are no trees in it,” said Diana, “for nobody lives along the road except the Copp girls and old Martin Bovyer at the further end, who is a Liberal.  The Tory government ran the road through when they were in power just to show they were doing something.”

Diana’s father was a Liberal, for which reason she and Anne never discussed politics.  Green Gables folk had always been Conservatives.

Finally the girls came to the old Copp homestead . . . a place of such exceeding external neatness that even Green Gables would have suffered by contrast.  The house was a very old-fashioned one, situated on a slope, which fact had necessitated the building of a stone basement under one end.  The house and out-buildings were all whitewashed to a condition of blinding perfection and not a weed was visible in the prim kitchen garden surrounded by its white paling.