Anne of the Island (Anne of Green Gables, #3)

by L.M. Montgomery

“I wonder if it will be—can be—any more beautiful than this,” murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom “home” must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars.

“You are very quiet, Anne,” said Gilbert at last. “I’m afraid to speak or move for fear all this wonderful beauty will vanish just like a broken silence,” breathed Anne.

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.

But feeling is so different from knowing. My common sense tells me all you can say, but there are times when common sense has no power over me. Common nonsense takes possession of my soul.

“I’m going to invent a swear word of my own,” he declared. “God will punish you if you do,” said Dora solemnly. “Then I think God is a mean old scamp,” retorted Davy. “Doesn’t He know a fellow must have some way of ’spressing his feelings?” “Davy!!!” said Dora. She expected that Davy would be struck down dead on the spot. But nothing happened.

Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it. But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen before—

How those girls enjoyed putting their nest in order! As Phil said, it was almost as good as getting married. You had the fun of homemaking without the bother of a husband.

“P.S. Anne, who was the devils father? I want to know.”

“I was born a see-saw, Aunty, and nothing can ever prevent me from teetering.”

Anne, I love you. You know I do. I—I can’t tell you how much. Will you promise me that some day you’ll be my wife?”

“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.

Marilla felt that out of her sixty years she had lived only the nine that had followed the advent of Anne.

You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul. You must leave fairyland behind you.”

“I wonder why everybody seems to think I ought to marry Gilbert Blythe,” said Anne petulantly. “Because you were made and meant for each other, Anne—that is why. You needn’t toss that young head of yours. It’s a fact.”

“Oh,” she thought, “how horrible it is that people have to grow up—and marry—and change!”

“I love them,” said Dorothy. “They are so nice and selfish. Dogs are too good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.”

“I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night,” groaned Phil. “If you live long enough both wishes will come true,” said Anne calmly.

‘There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves—so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful.’

“I think,” said Phil, “that a room where one dreams and grieves and rejoices and lives becomes inseparably connected with those processes and acquires a personality of its own.

“I have a dream,” he said slowly. “I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come true. I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends—and you!”

There was nobody else—there never could be anybody else for me but you. I’ve loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.”

Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed her. Then they walked home together in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew.