s my LATEST. Be sure to come up
tomorrow. I'm dying for a good talk with you. I want to hear all about
your doings at Redmond."

Anne knew that Ruby meant that she wanted to tell Anne all about her own
recent flirtations, but she promised to go, and Diana offered to go with
her.

"I've been wanting to go to see Ruby for a long while," she told Anne,
when they left Green Gables the next evening, "but I really couldn't
go alone. It's so awful to hear Ruby rattling on as she does, and
pretending there is nothing the matter with her, even when she can
hardly speak for coughing. She's fighting so hard for her life, and yet
she hasn't any chance at all, they say."

The girls walked silently down the red, twilit road. The robins were
singing vespers in the high treetops, filling the golden air with their
jubilant voices. The silver fluting of the frogs came from marshes and
ponds, over fields where seeds were beginning to stir with life and
thrill to the sunshine and rain that had drifted over them. The air
was fragrant with the wild, sweet, wholesome smell of young raspberry
copses. White mists were hovering in the silent hollows and violet stars
were shining bluely on the brooklands.

"What a beautiful sunset," said Diana. "Look, Anne, it's just like a
land in itself, isn't it? That long, low back of purple cloud is the
shore, and the clear sky further on is like a golden sea."

"If we could sail to it in the moonshine boat Paul wrote of in his old
composition--you remember?--how nice it would be," said Anne, rousing
from her reverie. "Do you think we could find all our yesterdays there,
Diana--all our old springs and blossoms? The beds of flowers that Paul
saw there are the roses that have bloomed for us in the past?"

"Don't!" said Diana. "You make me feel as if we were old women with
everything in life behind us."

"I think I've almost felt as if we were since I heard about poor Ruby,"
said Anne. "If it is true that she is dying any other sad thing might be
true, too."

"You don't mind calling in at Elisha Wright's for a moment, do you?"
asked Diana. "Mother asked me to leave this little dish of jelly for
Aunt Atossa."

"Who is Aunt Atossa?"

"Oh, haven't you heard? She's Mrs. Samson Coates of Spencervale--Mrs.
Elisha Wright's aunt. She's father's aunt, too. Her husband died last
winter and she was left very poor and lonely, so the Wrights took her to
live with them. Mother thought we ought to take her, but f