“Yes, if you are sure you won’t forget to say them, Davy-boy.”

“Oh, I won’t forget, you bet.  I think saying my prayers is great fun.  But it won’t be as good fun saying them alone as saying them to you.  I wish you’d stay home, Anne.  I don’t see what you want to go away and leave us for.”

“I don’t exactly want to, Davy, but I feel I ought to go.”

“If you don’t want to go you needn’t.  You’re grown up.  When I’m grown up I’m not going to do one single thing I don’t want to do, Anne.”

“All your life, Davy, you’ll find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.”

“I won’t,” said Davy flatly.  “Catch me!  I have to do things I don’t want to now ’cause you and Marilla’ll send me to bed if I don’t.  But when I grow up you can’t do that, and there’ll be nobody to tell me not to do things.  Won’t I have the time!  Say, Anne, Milty Boulter says his mother says you’re going to college to see if you can catch a man.  Are you, Anne?  I want to know.”

For a second Anne burned with resentment.  Then she laughed, reminding herself that Mrs. Boulter’s crude vulgarity of thought and speech could not harm her.

“No, Davy, I’m not.  I’m going to study and grow and learn about many things.”

“What things?”

     “’Shoes and ships and sealing wax
     And cabbages and kings,’”

quoted Anne.

“But if you did want to catch a man how would you go about it?  I want to know,” persisted Davy, for whom the subject evidently possessed a certain fascination.

“You’d better ask Mrs. Boulter,” said Anne thoughtlessly.  “I think it’s likely she knows more about the process than I do.”

“I will, the next time I see her,” said Davy gravely.

“Davy!  If you do!” cried Anne, realizing her mistake.

“But you just told me to,” protested Davy aggrieved.

“It’s time you went to bed,” decreed Anne, by way of getting out of the scrape.

After Davy had gone to bed Anne wandered down to Victoria Island and sat there alone, curtained with fine-spun, moonlit gloom, while the water laughed around her in a duet of brook and wind.  Anne had always loved that brook.  Many a dream had she spun over its sparkling water in days gone by.  She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence.  In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of “faery lands forlorn,” where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart’s Desire.  And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Chapter II

Garlands of Autumn

The following week sped swiftly, crowded with innumerable “last things,” as Anne called them.  Good-bye calls had to be made and received, being pleasant or otherwise, according to whether callers and called-upon were heartily in sympathy with Anne’s hopes, or thought she was too much puffed-up over going to college and that it was their duty to “take her down a peg or two.”