“I didn’t know what to do.  Would the conductor, I wondered, stop the car and put me off in ignominy and shame?  Was it possible that I could convince him that I was merely the victim of my own absentmindedness, and not an unprincipled creature trying to obtain a ride upon false pretenses?  How I wished that Alec or Alonzo were there.  But they weren’t because I wanted them.  If I hadn’t wanted them they would have been there by the dozen.  And I couldn’t decide what to say to the conductor when he came around.  As soon as I got one sentence of explanation mapped out in my mind I felt nobody could believe it and I must compose another.  It seemed there was nothing to do but trust in Providence, and for all the comfort that gave me I might as well have been the old lady who, when told by the captain during a storm that she must put her trust in the Almighty exclaimed, ‘Oh, Captain, is it as bad as that?’

“Just at the conventional moment, when all hope had fled, and the conductor was holding out his box to the passenger next to me, I suddenly remembered where I had put that wretched coin of the realm.  I hadn’t swallowed it after all.  I meekly fished it out of the index finger of my glove and poked it in the box.  I smiled at everybody and felt that it was a beautiful world.”

The visit to Echo Lodge was not the least pleasant of many pleasant holiday outings.  Anne and Diana went back to it by the old way of the beech woods, carrying a lunch basket with them.  Echo Lodge, which had been closed ever since Miss Lavendar’s wedding, was briefly thrown open to wind and sunshine once more, and firelight glimmered again in the little rooms.  The perfume of Miss Lavendar’s rose bowl still filled the air.  It was hardly possible to believe that Miss Lavendar would not come tripping in presently, with her brown eyes a-star with welcome, and that Charlotta the Fourth, blue of bow and wide of smile, would not pop through the door.  Paul, too, seemed hovering around, with his fairy fancies.

“It really makes me feel a little bit like a ghost revisiting the old time glimpses of the moon,” laughed Anne.  “Let’s go out and see if the echoes are at home.  Bring the old horn.  It is still behind the kitchen door.”

The echoes were at home, over the white river, as silver-clear and multitudinous as ever; and when they had ceased to answer the girls locked up Echo Lodge again and went away in the perfect half hour that follows the rose and saffron of a winter sunset.

Chapter VIII

Anne’s First Proposal

The old year did not slip away in a green twilight, with a pinky-yellow sunset.  Instead, it went out with a wild, white bluster and blow.  It was one of the nights when the storm-wind hurtles over the frozen meadows and black hollows, and moans around the eaves like a lost creature, and drives the snow sharply against the shaking panes.