The day was beautiful and the way was beautiful.  Anne was almost sorry when they reached Hester Gray’s garden, and sat down on the old bench.  But it was beautiful there, too—­as beautiful as it had been on the faraway day of the Golden Picnic, when Diana and Jane and Priscilla and she had found it.  Then it had been lovely with narcissus and violets; now golden rod had kindled its fairy torches in the corners and asters dotted it bluely.  The call of the brook came up through the woods from the valley of birches with all its old allurement; the mellow air was full of the purr of the sea; beyond were fields rimmed by fences bleached silvery gray in the suns of many summers, and long hills scarfed with the shadows of autumnal clouds; with the blowing of the west wind old dreams returned.

“I think,” said Anne softly, “that ‘the land where dreams come true’ is in the blue haze yonder, over that little valley.”

“Have you any unfulfilled dreams, Anne?” asked Gilbert.

Something in his tone—­something she had not heard since that miserable evening in the orchard at Patty’s Place—­made Anne’s heart beat wildly.  But she made answer lightly.

“Of course.  Everybody has.  It wouldn’t do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled.  We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.  What a delicious aroma that low-descending sun is extracting from the asters and ferns.  I wish we could see perfumes as well as smell them.  I’m sure they would be very beautiful.”

Gilbert was not to be thus sidetracked.

“I have a dream,” he said slowly.  “I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come true.  I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends—­and you!”

Anne wanted to speak but she could find no words.  Happiness was breaking over her like a wave.  It almost frightened her.

“I asked you a question over two years ago, Anne.  If I ask it again today will you give me a different answer?”

Still Anne could not speak.  But she lifted her eyes, shining with all the love-rapture of countless generations, and looked into his for a moment.  He wanted no other answer.

They lingered in the old garden until twilight, sweet as dusk in Eden must have been, crept over it.  There was so much to talk over and recall—­things said and done and heard and thought and felt and misunderstood.

“I thought you loved Christine Stuart,” Anne told him, as reproachfully as if she had not given him every reason to suppose that she loved Roy Gardner.

Gilbert laughed boyishly.