Gilbert gave a bitter little laugh.

“Friends!  Your friendship can’t satisfy me, Anne.  I want your love—­and you tell me I can never have that.”

“I’m sorry.  Forgive me, Gilbert,” was all Anne could say.  Where, oh, where were all the gracious and graceful speeches wherewith, in imagination, she had been wont to dismiss rejected suitors?

Gilbert released her hand gently.

“There isn’t anything to forgive.  There have been times when I thought you did care.  I’ve deceived myself, that’s all.  Goodbye, Anne.”

Anne got herself to her room, sat down on her window seat behind the pines, and cried bitterly.  She felt as if something incalculably precious had gone out of her life.  It was Gilbert’s friendship, of course.  Oh, why must she lose it after this fashion?

“What is the matter, honey?” asked Phil, coming in through the moonlit gloom.

Anne did not answer.  At that moment she wished Phil were a thousand miles away.

“I suppose you’ve gone and refused Gilbert Blythe.  You are an idiot, Anne Shirley!”

“Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry a man I don’t love?” said Anne coldly, goaded to reply.

“You don’t know love when you see it.  You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that.  There, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever said in my life.  I wonder how I managed it?”

“Phil,” pleaded Anne, “please go away and leave me alone for a little while.  My world has tumbled into pieces.  I want to reconstruct it.”

“Without any Gilbert in it?” said Phil, going.

A world without any Gilbert in it!  Anne repeated the words drearily.  Would it not be a very lonely, forlorn place?  Well, it was all Gilbert’s fault.  He had spoiled their beautiful comradeship.  She must just learn to live without it.

Chapter XXI

Roses of Yesterday

The fortnight Anne spent in Bolingbroke was a very pleasant one, with a little under current of vague pain and dissatisfaction running through it whenever she thought about Gilbert.  There was not, however, much time to think about him.  “Mount Holly,” the beautiful old Gordon homestead, was a very gay place, overrun by Phil’s friends of both sexes.  There was quite a bewildering succession of drives, dances, picnics and boating parties, all expressively lumped together by Phil under the head of “jamborees”; Alec and Alonzo were so constantly on hand that Anne wondered if they ever did anything but dance attendance on that will-o’-the-wisp of a Phil.  They were both nice, manly fellows, but Anne would not be drawn into any opinion as to which was the nicer.

“And I depended so on you to help me make up my mind which of them I should promise to marry,” mourned Phil.

“You must do that for yourself.  You are quite expert at making up your mind as to whom other people should marry,” retorted Anne, rather caustically.