Anne had wandered down to the Dryad’s Bubble and was curled up among the ferns at the root of the big white birch where she and Gilbert had so often sat in summers gone by.  He had gone into the newspaper office again when college closed, and Avonlea seemed very dull without him.  He never wrote to her, and Anne missed the letters that never came.  To be sure, Roy wrote twice a week; his letters were exquisite compositions which would have read beautifully in a memoir or biography.  Anne felt herself more deeply in love with him than ever when she read them; but her heart never gave the queer, quick, painful bound at sight of his letters which it had given one day when Mrs. Hiram Sloane had handed her out an envelope addressed in Gilbert’s black, upright handwriting.  Anne had hurried home to the east gable and opened it eagerly—­to find a typewritten copy of some college society report—­“only that and nothing more.”  Anne flung the harmless screed across her room and sat down to write an especially nice epistle to Roy.

Diana was to be married in five more days.  The gray house at Orchard Slope was in a turmoil of baking and brewing and boiling and stewing, for there was to be a big, old-timey wedding.  Anne, of course, was to be bridesmaid, as had been arranged when they were twelve years old, and Gilbert was coming from Kingsport to be best man.  Anne was enjoying the excitement of the various preparations, but under it all she carried a little heartache.  She was, in a sense, losing her dear old chum; Diana’s new home would be two miles from Green Gables, and the old constant companionship could never be theirs again.  Anne looked up at Diana’s light and thought how it had beaconed to her for many years; but soon it would shine through the summer twilights no more.  Two big, painful tears welled up in her gray eyes.

“Oh,” she thought, “how horrible it is that people have to grow up—­and marry—­and change!”

Chapter XXIX

Diana’s Wedding

“After all, the only real roses are the pink ones,” said Anne, as she tied white ribbon around Diana’s bouquet in the westward-looking gable at Orchard Slope.  “They are the flowers of love and faith.”

Diana was standing nervously in the middle of the room, arrayed in her bridal white, her black curls frosted over with the film of her wedding veil.  Anne had draped that veil, in accordance with the sentimental compact of years before.

“It’s all pretty much as I used to imagine it long ago, when I wept over your inevitable marriage and our consequent parting,” she laughed.  “You are the bride of my dreams, Diana, with the ‘lovely misty veil’; and I am your bridesmaid.  But, alas!  I haven’t the puffed sleeves—­though these short lace ones are even prettier.  Neither is my heart wholly breaking nor do I exactly hate Fred.”

“We are not really parting, Anne,” protested Diana.  “I’m not going far away.  We’ll love each other just as much as ever.  We’ve always kept that ‘oath’ of friendship we swore long ago, haven’t we?”