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"I'll win that scholarship if hard work can do it," she resolved.

"Wouldn't Matthew be proud if I got to be a B.A.? Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions.

I'm so glad I have such a lot.

And there never seems to be any end to them-that's the best of it.

Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still.

It does make life so interesting."

Anne's homesickness wore off, greatly helped in the wearing by her weekend visits home.

As long as the open weather lasted the Avonlea students went out to Carmody on the new branch railway every Friday night.

Diana and several other Avonlea young folks were generally on hand to meet them and they all walked over to Avonlea in a merry party.

Anne thought those Friday evening gypsyings over the autumnal hills in the crisp golden air, with the homelights of Avonlea twinkling beyond, were the best and dearest hours in the whole week.

Gilbert Blythe nearly always walked with Ruby Gillis and carried her satchel for her.

Ruby was a very handsome young lady, now thinking herself quite as grown up as she really was; she wore her skirts as long as her mother would let her and did her hair up in town, though she had to take it down when she went home.

She had large, bright-blue eyes, a brilliant complexion, and a plump showy figure.

She laughed a great deal, was cheerful and good-tempered, and enjoyed the pleasant things of life frankly.

"But I shouldn't think she was the sort of girl Gilbert would like," whispered Jane to Anne.

Anne did not think so either, but she would not have said so for the Avery scholarship.

She could not help thinking, too, that it would be very pleasant to have such a friend as Gilbert to jest and chatter with and exchange ideas about books and studies and ambitions.

Gilbert had ambitions, she knew, and Ruby Gillis did not seem the sort of person with whom such could be profitably discussed.

There was no silly sentiment in Anne's ideas concerning Gilbert.

Boys were to her, when she thought about them at all, merely possible good comrades.

If she and Gilbert had been friends she would not have cared how many other friends he had nor with whom he walked.

She had a genius for friendship; girl friends she had in plenty; but she had a vague consciousness that masculine friendship might also be a good thing to round out one's conceptions of companionship and furnish broader standpoints of judgment and comparison.

Not that Anne could have put her feelings on the matter into just such clear definition.

But she thought that if Gilbert had ever walked home with her from the train, over the crisp fields and along the ferny byways, they might have had many and merry and interesting conversations about the new world that was opening around them and their hopes and ambitions therein.

CHAPTER XXXV. The Winter at Queen's

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