up her green dress and sighed again.

When Gilbert came the next afternoon he found Anne waiting for him,
fresh as the dawn and fair as a star, after all the gaiety of the
preceding night. She wore a green dress--not the one she had worn to
the wedding, but an old one which Gilbert had told her at a Redmond
reception he liked especially. It was just the shade of green that
brought out the rich tints of her hair, and the starry gray of her
eyes and the iris-like delicacy of her skin. Gilbert, glancing at her
sideways as they walked along a shadowy woodpath, thought she had never
looked so lovely. Anne, glancing sideways at Gilbert, now and then,
thought how much older he looked since his illness. It was as if he had
put boyhood behind him forever.

The day was beautiful and the way was beautiful. Anne was almost sorry
when they reached Hester Gray's garden, and sat down on the old bench.
But it was beautiful there, too--as beautiful as it had been on the
faraway day of the Golden Picnic, when Diana and Jane and Priscilla and
she had found it. Then it had been lovely with narcissus and violets;
now golden rod had kindled its fairy torches in the corners and asters
dotted it bluely. The call of the brook came up through the woods from
the valley of birches with all its old allurement; the mellow air
was full of the purr of the sea; beyond were fields rimmed by fences
bleached silvery gray in the suns of many summers, and long hills
scarfed with the shadows of autumnal clouds; with the blowing of the
west wind old dreams returned.

"I think," said Anne softly, "that 'the land where dreams come true' is
in the blue haze yonder, over that little valley."

"Have you any unfulfilled dreams, Anne?" asked Gilbert.

Something in his tone--something she had not heard since that miserable
evening in the orchard at Patty's Place--made Anne's heart beat wildly.
But she made answer lightly.

"Of course. Everybody has. It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams
fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream
about. What a delicious aroma that low-descending sun is extracting
from the asters and ferns. I wish we could see perfumes as well as smell
them. I'm sure they would be very beautiful."

Gilbert was not to be thus sidetracked.

"I have a dream," he said slowly. "I persist in dreaming it, although it
has often seemed to me that it could never come true. I dream of a home
with a hearth-fire in it, a