se together in your souls. The barrier between you is her
experience of sorrow and trouble. She ain't responsible for it and you
ain't; but it's there and neither of you can cross it."

"My childhood wasn't very happy before I came to Green Gables," said
Anne, gazing soberly out of the window at the still, sad, dead beauty
of the leafless tree-shadows on the moonlit snow.

"Mebbe not--but it was just the usual unhappiness of a child who hasn't
anyone to look after it properly. There hasn't been any TRAGEDY in
your life, Mistress Blythe. And poor Leslie's has been almost ALL
tragedy. She feels, I reckon, though mebbe she hardly knows she feels
it, that there's a vast deal in her life you can't enter nor
understand--and so she has to keep you back from it--hold you off, so
to speak, from hurting her. You know if we've got anything about us
that hurts we shrink from anyone's touch on or near it. It holds good
with our souls as well as our bodies, I reckon. Leslie's soul must be
near raw--it's no wonder she hides it away."

"If that were really all, I wouldn't mind, Captain Jim. I would
understand. But there are times--not always, but now and again--when I
almost have to believe that Leslie doesn't--doesn't like me. Sometimes
I surprise a look in her eyes that seems to show resentment and
dislike--it goes so quickly--but I've seen it, I'm sure of that. And
it hurts me, Captain Jim. I'm not used to being disliked--and I've
tried so hard to win Leslie's friendship."

"You have won it, Mistress Blythe. Don't you go cherishing any foolish
notion that Leslie don't like you. If she didn't she wouldn't have
anything to do with you, much less chumming with you as she does. I
know Leslie Moore too well not to be sure of that."

"The first time I ever saw her, driving her geese down the hill on the
day I came to Four Winds, she looked at me with the same expression,"
persisted Anne. "I felt it, even in the midst of my admiration of her
beauty. She looked at me resentfully--she did, indeed, Captain Jim."

"The resentment must have been about something else, Mistress Blythe,
and you jest come in for a share of it because you happened past.
Leslie DOES take sullen spells now and again, poor girl. I can't blame
her, when I know what she has to put up with. I don't know why it's
permitted. The doctor and I have talked a lot abut the origin of evil,
but we haven't quite found out all about it yet. There's a vast