Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

"We've got each other, Anne.

I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here-if you'd never come.

Oh, Anne, I know I've been kind of strict and harsh with you maybe-but you mustn't think I didn't love you as well as Matthew did, for all that.

I want to tell you now when I can.

It's never been easy for me to say things out of my heart, but at times like this it's easier.

I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you've been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables."

Two days afterwards they carried Matthew Cuthbert over his homestead threshold and away from the fields he had tilled and the orchards he had loved and the trees he had planted; and then Avonlea settled back to its usual placidity and even at Green Gables affairs slipped into their old groove and work was done and duties fulfilled with regularity as before, although always with the aching sense of "loss in all familiar things." Anne, new to grief, thought it almost sad that it could be so-that they COULD go on in the old way without Matthew.

She felt something like shame and remorse when she discovered that the sunrises behind the firs and the pale pink buds opening in the garden gave her the old inrush of gladness when she saw them-that Diana's visits were pleasant to her and that Diana's merry words and ways moved her to laughter and smiles-that, in brief, the beautiful world of blossom and love and friendship had lost none of its power to please her fancy and thrill her heart, that life still called to her with many insistent voices.

"It seems like disloyalty to Matthew, somehow, to find pleasure in these things now that he has gone," she said wistfully to Mrs. Allan one evening when they were together in the manse garden.

"I miss him so much-all the time-and yet, Mrs. Allan, the world and life seem very beautiful and interesting to me for all.

Today Diana said something funny and I found myself laughing.

I thought when it happened I could never laugh again.

And it somehow seems as if I oughtn't to."

"When Matthew was here he liked to hear you laugh and he liked to know that you found pleasure in the pleasant things around you," said Mrs. Allan gently.

"He is just away now; and he likes to know it just the same.

I am sure we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us.

But I can understand your feeling.

I think we all experience the same thing.

We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find our interest in life returning to us."

"I was down to the graveyard to plant a rosebush on Matthew's grave this afternoon," said Anne dreamily.

"I took a slip of the little white Scotch rosebush his mother brought out from Scotland long ago; Matthew always liked those roses the best-they were so small and sweet on their thorny stems.

It made me feel glad that I could plant it by his grave-as if I were doing something that must please him in taking it there to be near him.

I hope he has roses like them in heaven.

Perhaps the souls of all those little white roses that he has loved so many summers were all there to meet him.

I must go home now.

Table of Contents