“I’ll go, if I can walk with Priscilla and Charlie.  That will be a bearable degree of gooseberry.  That Gilbert of yours is a darling, Anne, but why does he go around so much with Goggle-eyes?”

Anne stiffened.  She had no great liking for Charlie Sloane; but he was of Avonlea, so no outsider had any business to laugh at him.

“Charlie and Gilbert have always been friends,” she said coldly.  “Charlie is a nice boy.  He’s not to blame for his eyes.”

“Don’t tell me that!  He is!  He must have done something dreadful in a previous existence to be punished with such eyes.  Pris and I are going to have such sport with him this afternoon.  We’ll make fun of him to his face and he’ll never know it.”

Doubtless, “the abandoned P’s,” as Anne called them, did carry out their amiable intentions.  But Sloane was blissfully ignorant; he thought he was quite a fine fellow to be walking with two such coeds, especially Philippa Gordon, the class beauty and belle.  It must surely impress Anne.  She would see that some people appreciated him at his real value.

Gilbert and Anne loitered a little behind the others, enjoying the calm, still beauty of the autumn afternoon under the pines of the park, on the road that climbed and twisted round the harbor shore.

“The silence here is like a prayer, isn’t it?” said Anne, her face upturned to the shining sky.  “How I love the pines!  They seem to strike their roots deep into the romance of all the ages.  It is so comforting to creep away now and then for a good talk with them.  I always feel so happy out here.”

“’And so in mountain solitudes o’ertaken
As by some spell divine,
Their cares drop from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine,’”

quoted Gilbert.

“They make our little ambitions seem rather petty, don’t they, Anne?”

“I think, if ever any great sorrow came to me, I would come to the pines for comfort,” said Anne dreamily.

“I hope no great sorrow ever will come to you, Anne,” said Gilbert, who could not connect the idea of sorrow with the vivid, joyous creature beside him, unwitting that those who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths, and that the natures which enjoy most keenly are those which also suffer most sharply.

“But there must—­sometime,” mused Anne.  “Life seems like a cup of glory held to my lips just now.  But there must be some bitterness in it—­there is in every cup.  I shall taste mine some day.  Well, I hope I shall be strong and brave to meet it.  And I hope it won’t be through my own fault that it will come.  Do you remember what Dr. Davis said last Sunday evening—­that the sorrows God sent us brought comfort and strength with them, while the sorrows we brought on ourselves, through folly or wickedness, were by far the hardest to bear?  But we mustn’t talk of sorrow on an afternoon like this.  It’s meant for the sheer joy of living, isn’t it?”