“Oh, thank you—­thank you,” cried Anne, clasping the packet rapturously.

“That was all that was in the house,” said her hostess.  “The furniture was all sold to pay the doctor bills, and Mrs. Thomas got your ma’s clothes and little things.  I reckon they didn’t last long among that drove of Thomas youngsters.  They was destructive young animals, as I mind ’em.”

“I haven’t one thing that belonged to my mother,” said Anne, chokily.  “I—­I can never thank you enough for these letters.”

“You’re quite welcome.  Laws, but your eyes is like your ma’s.  She could just about talk with hers.  Your father was sorter homely but awful nice.  I mind hearing folks say when they was married that there never was two people more in love with each other—­Pore creatures, they didn’t live much longer; but they was awful happy while they was alive, and I s’pose that counts for a good deal.”

Anne longed to get home to read her precious letters; but she made one little pilgrimage first.  She went alone to the green corner of the “old” Bolingbroke cemetery where her father and mother were buried, and left on their grave the white flowers she carried.  Then she hastened back to Mount Holly, shut herself up in her room, and read the letters.  Some were written by her father, some by her mother.  There were not many—­only a dozen in all—­for Walter and Bertha Shirley had not been often separated during their courtship.  The letters were yellow and faded and dim, blurred with the touch of passing years.  No profound words of wisdom were traced on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only lines of love and trust.  The sweetness of forgotten things clung to them—­the far-off, fond imaginings of those long-dead lovers.  Bertha Shirley had possessed the gift of writing letters which embodied the charming personality of the writer in words and thoughts that retained their beauty and fragrance after the lapse of time.  The letters were tender, intimate, sacred.  To Anne, the sweetest of all was the one written after her birth to the father on a brief absence.  It was full of a proud young mother’s accounts of “baby”—­her cleverness, her brightness, her thousand sweetnesses.

“I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake,” Bertha Shirley had written in the postscript.  Probably it was the last sentence she had ever penned.  The end was very near for her.

“This has been the most beautiful day of my life,” Anne said to Phil that night.  “I’ve found my father and mother.  Those letters have made them real to me.  I’m not an orphan any longer.  I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its leaves.”

Chapter XXII

Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables

The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen walls at Green Gables, for the spring evening was chilly; through the open east window drifted in the subtly sweet voices of the night.  Marilla was sitting by the fire—­at least, in body.  In spirit she was roaming olden ways, with feet grown young.  Of late Marilla had thus spent many an hour, when she thought she should have been knitting for the twins.