if they're not as interesting as the
other kind."

Gilbert Blythe was probably the only person to whom the news of Anne's
resignation brought unmixed pleasure. Her pupils looked upon it as
a sheer catastrophe. Annetta Bell had hysterics when she went home.
Anthony Pye fought two pitched and unprovoked battles with other boys by
way of relieving his feelings. Barbara Shaw cried all night. Paul Irving
defiantly told his grandmother that she needn't expect him to eat any
porridge for a week.

"I can't do it, Grandma," he said. "I don't really know if I can eat
ANYTHING. I feel as if there was a dreadful lump in my throat. I'd have
cried coming home from school if Jake Donnell hadn't been watching me.
I believe I will cry after I go to bed. It wouldn't show on my eyes
tomorrow, would it? And it would be such a relief. But anyway, I can't
eat porridge. I'm going to need all my strength of mind to bear up
against this, Grandma, and I won't have any left to grapple with
porridge. Oh Grandma, I don't know what I'll do when my beautiful
teacher goes away. Milty Boulter says he bets Jane Andrews will get
the school. I suppose Miss Andrews is very nice. But I know she won't
understand things like Miss Shirley."

Diana also took a very pessimistic view of affairs.

"It will be horribly lonesome here next winter," she mourned, one
twilight when the moonlight was raining "airy silver" through the cherry
boughs and filling the east gable with a soft, dream-like radiance
in which the two girls sat and talked, Anne on her low rocker by the
window, Diana sitting Turkfashion on the bed. "You and Gilbert will
be gone . . . and the Allans too. They are going to call Mr. Allan to
Charlottetown and of course he'll accept. It's too mean. We'll be
vacant all winter, I suppose, and have to listen to a long string of
candidates . . . and half of them won't be any good."

"I hope they won't call Mr. Baxter from East Grafton here, anyhow,"
said Anne decidedly. "He wants the call but he does preach such gloomy
sermons. Mr. Bell says he's a minister of the old school, but Mrs. Lynde
says there's nothing whatever the matter with him but indigestion. His
wife isn't a very good cook, it seems, and Mrs. Lynde says that when a
man has to eat sour bread two weeks out of three his theology is bound
to get a kink in it somewhere. Mrs. Allan feels very badly about going
away. She says everybody has been so kind to her since she came here
as a bride th