e made one
little pilgrimage first. She went alone to the green corner of the "old"
Bolingbroke cemetery where her father and mother were buried, and left
on their grave the white flowers she carried. Then she hastened back
to Mount Holly, shut herself up in her room, and read the letters.
Some were written by her father, some by her mother. There were not
many--only a dozen in all--for Walter and Bertha Shirley had not been
often separated during their courtship. The letters were yellow and
faded and dim, blurred with the touch of passing years. No profound
words of wisdom were traced on the stained and wrinkled pages, but only
lines of love and trust. The sweetness of forgotten things clung to
them--the far-off, fond imaginings of those long-dead lovers. Bertha
Shirley had possessed the gift of writing letters which embodied the
charming personality of the writer in words and thoughts that retained
their beauty and fragrance after the lapse of time. The letters were
tender, intimate, sacred. To Anne, the sweetest of all was the one
written after her birth to the father on a brief absence. It was full
of a proud young mother's accounts of "baby"--her cleverness, her
brightness, her thousand sweetnesses.

"I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake,"
Bertha Shirley had written in the postscript. Probably it was the last
sentence she had ever penned. The end was very near for her.

"This has been the most beautiful day of my life," Anne said to Phil
that night. "I've FOUND my father and mother. Those letters have made
them REAL to me. I'm not an orphan any longer. I feel as if I had opened
a book and found roses of yesterday, sweet and beloved, between its
leaves."

Chapter XXII

Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables

The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen walls at Green
Gables, for the spring evening was chilly; through the open east window
drifted in the subtly sweet voices of the night. Marilla was sitting by
the fire--at least, in body. In spirit she was roaming olden ways, with
feet grown young. Of late Marilla had thus spent many an hour, when she
thought she should have been knitting for the twins.

"I suppose I'm growing old," she said.

Yet Marilla had changed but little in the past nine years, save to grow
something thinner, and even more angular; there was a little more gray
in the hair that was still twisted up in the same hard knot, with two
hairpins-