she come home she said
she wasn't going to visit for family duty no more. 'I've come home in
love with loneliness, Charlotta,' she says to me, 'and I never want to
stray from my own vine and fig tree again. My relations try so hard to
make an old lady of me and it has a bad effect on me.' Just like that,
Miss Shirley, ma'am. 'It has a very bad effect on me.' So I don't think
it would do any good to coax her to go visiting."

"We must see what can be done," said Anne decidedly, as she put the last
possible berry in her pink cup. "Just as soon as I have my vacation I'll
come through and spend a whole week with you. We'll have a picnic every
day and pretend all sorts of interesting things, and see if we can't
cheer Miss Lavendar up."

"That will be the very thing, Miss Shirley, ma'am," exclaimed Charlotta
the Fourth in rapture. She was glad for Miss Lavendar's sake and for her
own too. With a whole week in which to study Anne constantly she would
surely be able to learn how to move and behave like her.

When the girls got back to Echo Lodge they found that Miss Lavendar
and Paul had carried the little square table out of the kitchen to
the garden and had everything ready for tea. Nothing ever tasted so
delicious as those strawberries and cream, eaten under a great blue
sky all curdled over with fluffy little white clouds, and in the long
shadows of the wood with its lispings and its murmurings. After tea Anne
helped Charlotta wash the dishes in the kitchen, while Miss Lavendar sat
on the stone bench with Paul and heard all about his rock people. She
was a good listener, this sweet Miss Lavendar, but just at the last it
struck Paul that she had suddenly lost interest in the Twin Sailors.

"Miss Lavendar, why do you look at me like that?" he asked gravely.

"How do I look, Paul?"

"Just as if you were looking through me at somebody I put you in mind
of," said Paul, who had such occasional flashes of uncanny insight that
it wasn't quite safe to have secrets when he was about.

"You do put me in mind of somebody I knew long ago," said Miss Lavendar
dreamily.

"When you were young?"

"Yes, when I was young. Do I seem very old to you, Paul?"

"Do you know, I can't make up my mind about that," said Paul
confidentially. "Your hair looks old . . . I never knew a young person
with white hair. But your eyes are as young as my beautiful teacher's
when you laugh. I tell you what, Miss Lavendar" . . . Paul's voice and
face