your bounden
duty to leave them there.

Anne scurried down to the pantry, which, always dim from the big willow
growing close to the window, was now almost dark by reason of the shade
drawn to exclude flies. Anne caught the bottle containing the lotion
from the shelf and copiously anointed her nose therewith by means of
a little sponge sacred to the purpose. This important duty done, she
returned to her work. Any one who has ever shifted feathers from one
tick to another will not need to be told that when Anne finished she
was a sight to behold. Her dress was white with down and fluff, and her
front hair, escaping from under the handkerchief, was adorned with a
veritable halo of feathers. At this auspicious moment a knock sounded at
the kitchen door.

"That must be Mr. Shearer," thought Anne. "I'm in a dreadful mess but
I'll have to run down as I am, for he's always in a hurry."

Down flew Anne to the kitchen door. If ever a charitable floor did open
to swallow up a miserable, befeathered damsel the Green Gables porch
floor should promptly have engulfed Anne at that moment. On the doorstep
were standing Priscilla Grant, golden and fair in silk attire, a short,
stout gray-haired lady in a tweed suit, and another lady, tall
stately, wonderfully gowned, with a beautiful, highbred face and large,
black-lashed violet eyes, whom Anne "instinctively felt," as she would
have said in her earlier days, to be Mrs. Charlotte E. Morgan.

In the dismay of the moment one thought stood out from the confusion of
Anne's mind and she grasped at it as at the proverbial straw. All Mrs.
Morgan's heroines were noted for "rising to the occasion." No matter
what their troubles were, they invariably rose to the occasion and
showed their superiority over all ills of time, space, and quantity.
Anne therefore felt it was HER duty to rise to the occasion and she did
it, so perfectly that Priscilla afterward declared she never admired
Anne Shirley more than at that moment. No matter what her outraged
feelings were she did not show them. She greeted Priscilla and was
introduced to her companions as calmly and composedly as if she had been
arrayed in purple and fine linen. To be sure, it was somewhat of a shock
to find that the lady she had instinctively felt to be Mrs. Morgan was
not Mrs. Morgan at all, but an unknown Mrs. Pendexter, while the stout
little gray-haired woman was Mrs. Morgan; but in the greater shock the
lesser lost its power. Anne