just worshipped him.

Gil and Anne both wrote to me off and on, but never a word, not so
much as a name, did they say of each other. I'd 'a' writ and asked 'em
the rights of the fuss if I could, in hopes of patching it up, but I
can't write now--my hand is too shaky--and mebbe it was just as well,
for meddling is terribly risky work in a love trouble, Nora May.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the last state of a meddler and
them she meddles with is worse than the first.

So I just set tight and said nothing, while everybody else in the clan
was talking Anne and Gil sixty words to the minute.

Well, last birthday morning I was feeling terrible disperrited. I had
made up my mind that my birthday was always to be a good thing for
other people, and there didn't seem one blessed thing I could do to
make anybody glad. Emma Matilda and George and the children were all
well and happy and wanted for nothing that I could give them. I begun
to be afraid I'd lived long enough, Nora May. When a woman gets to the
point where she can't give a gift of joy to anyone, there ain't much
use in her living. I felt real old and worn out and useless.

I was sitting here under these very trees--they was just budding out
in leaf then, as young and cheerful as if they wasn't a hundred years
old. And I sighed right out loud and said, "Oh, Grandpa Holland, it's
time I was put away up on the hill there with you." And with that the
gate banged and there was Nancy Jane Whitmore's boy, Sam, with two
letters for me.

One was from Anne up at St. Mary's and the other was from Gil out in
Manitoba.

I read Anne's first. She just struck right into things in the first
paragraph. She said her year at St. Mary's was nearly up, and when it
was she meant to quit teaching and go away to New York and learn to be
a trained nurse. She said she was just broken-hearted about Gilbert,
and would always love him to the day of her death. But she knew he
didn't care anything more about her after the way he had acted, and
there was nothing left for her in life but to do something for other
people, and so on and so on, for twelve mortal pages. Anne is a fine
writer, and I just cried like a babe over that letter, it was so
touching, although I was enjoying myself hugely all the time, I was so
delighted to find out that Anne loved Gilbert still. I was getting
skeered she didn't, her letters all winter had been so kind of jokey
and frivolous, all about the good times s