Mary Gillespie’s Susan Jane announced tea at this moment, and I was thankful, for my imagination was giving out, and I didn’t know what question those girls would ask next.  But I felt already a change in the mental atmosphere surrounding me, and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation.  Repentant?  Ashamed?  Not a bit of it!  I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.

When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly, and said: 

“You look like a girl to-night, Miss Charlotte.”

“I feel like one,” I said laughing; and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before—­wrote a second poem in the same day.  I had to have some outlet for my feelings.  I called it “In Summer Days of Long Ago,” and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.

For the next two months all went well and merrily.  Nobody ever said anything more to me about Cecil Fenwick, but the girls all chattered freely to me of their little love affairs, and I became a sort of general confidant for them.  It just warmed up the cockles of my heart, and I began to enjoy the Sewing Circle famously.  I got a lot of pretty new dresses and the dearest hat, and I went everywhere I was asked and had a good time.

But there is one thing you can be perfectly sure of.  If you do wrong you are going to be punished for it sometime, somehow and somewhere.  My punishment was delayed for two months, and then it descended on my head and I was crushed to the very dust.

Another new family besides the Mercers had come to Avonlea in the spring—­the Maxwells.  There were just Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell; they were a middle-aged couple and very well off.  Mr. Maxwell had bought the lumber mills, and they lived up at the old Spencer place which had always been “the” place of Avonlea.  They lived quietly, and Mrs. Maxwell hardly ever went anywhere because she was delicate.  She was out when I called and I was out when she returned my call, so that I had never met her.

It was the Sewing Circle day again—­at Sarah Gardiner’s this time.  I was late; everybody else was there when I arrived, and the minute I entered the room I knew something had happened, although I couldn’t imagine what.  Everybody looked at me in the strangest way.  Of course, Wilhelmina Mercer was the first to set her tongue going.

“Oh, Miss Holmes, have you seen him yet?” she exclaimed.

“Seen whom?” I said non-excitedly, getting out my thimble and patterns.

“Why, Cecil Fenwick.  He’s here—­in Avonlea—­visiting his sister, Mrs. Maxwell.”

I suppose I did what they expected me to do.  I dropped everything I held, and Josephine Cameron said afterwards that Charlotte Holmes would never be paler when she was in her coffin.  If they had just known why I turned so pale!