at she feels as if she were leaving lifelong friends. And
then, there's the baby's grave, you know. She says she doesn't see how
she can go away and leave that . . . it was such a little mite of a thing
and only three months old, and she says she is afraid it will miss its
mother, although she knows better and wouldn't say so to Mr. Allan for
anything. She says she has slipped through the birch grove back of the
manse nearly every night to the graveyard and sung a little lullaby to
it. She told me all about it last evening when I was up putting some of
those early wild roses on Matthew's grave. I promised her that as long
as I was in Avonlea I would put flowers on the baby's grave and when I
was away I felt sure that . . ."

"That I would do it," supplied Diana heartily. "Of course I will. And
I'll put them on Matthew's grave too, for your sake, Anne."

"Oh, thank you. I meant to ask you to if you would. And on little Hester
Gray's too? Please don't forget hers. Do you know, I've thought and
dreamed so much about little Hester Gray that she has become strangely
real to me. I think of her, back there in her little garden in that
cool, still, green corner; and I have a fancy that if I could steal back
there some spring evening, just at the magic time 'twixt light and
dark, and tiptoe so softly up the beech hill that my footsteps could not
frighten her, I would find the garden just as it used to be, all sweet
with June lilies and early roses, with the tiny house beyond it all hung
with vines; and little Hester Gray would be there, with her soft eyes,
and the wind ruffling her dark hair, wandering about, putting her
fingertips under the chins of the lilies and whispering secrets with the
roses; and I would go forward, oh, so softly, and hold out my hands and
say to her, 'Little Hester Gray, won't you let me be your playmate, for
I love the roses too?' And we would sit down on the old bench and talk
a little and dream a little, or just be beautifully silent together. And
then the moon would rise and I would look around me . . . and there would
be no Hester Gray and no little vine-hung house, and no roses . . . only
an old waste garden starred with June lilies amid the grasses, and the
wind sighing, oh, so sorrowfully in the cherry trees. And I would not
know whether it had been real or if I had just imagined it all." Diana
crawled up and got her back against the headboard of the bed. When your
companion of twilight hour sai