p bitter tears if I did."

Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had
been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing and her dramatic
ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner hour. Ruby Gillis
smuggled three blue plums over to her during testament reading; Ella May
MacPherson gave her an enormous yellow pansy cut from the covers of a
floral catalogue--a species of desk decoration much prized in Avonlea
school. Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new
pattern of knit lace, so nice for trimming aprons. Katie Boulter gave
her a perfume bottle to keep slate water in, and Julia Bell copied
carefully on a piece of pale pink paper scalloped on the edges the
following effusion:

When twilight drops her curtain down
And pins it with a star
Remember that you have a friend
Though she may wander far.

"It's so nice to be appreciated," sighed Anne rapturously to Marilla
that night.

The girls were not the only scholars who "appreciated" her. When Anne
went to her seat after dinner hour--she had been told by Mr. Phillips to
sit with the model Minnie Andrews--she found on her desk a big luscious
"strawberry apple." Anne caught it up all ready to take a bite when she
remembered that the only place in Avonlea where strawberry apples grew
was in the old Blythe orchard on the other side of the Lake of Shining
Waters. Anne dropped the apple as if it were a red-hot coal and
ostentatiously wiped her fingers on her handkerchief. The apple lay
untouched on her desk until the next morning, when little Timothy
Andrews, who swept the school and kindled the fire, annexed it as one
of his perquisites. Charlie Sloane's slate pencil, gorgeously bedizened
with striped red and yellow paper, costing two cents where ordinary
pencils cost only one, which he sent up to her after dinner hour, met
with a more favorable reception. Anne was graciously pleased to accept
it and rewarded the donor with a smile which exalted that infatuated
youth straightway into the seventh heaven of delight and caused him to
make such fearful errors in his dictation that Mr. Phillips kept him in
after school to rewrite it.

But as,

The Caesar's pageant shorn of Brutus' bust
Did but of Rome's best son remind her more.

so the marked absence of any tribute or recognition from Diana Barry who
was sitting with Gertie Pye embittered Anne's little triumph.

"Diana might just have smiled at me on