e wrong path that day we went to Mr. Kimball's I'd never
have known Miss Lavendar; and if I hadn't met her I'd never have taken
Paul there . . . and he'd never have written to his father about visiting
Miss Lavendar just as Mr. Irving was starting for San Francisco. Mr.
Irving says whenever he got that letter he made up his mind to send his
partner to San Francisco and come here instead. He hadn't heard anything
of Miss Lavendar for fifteen years. Somebody had told him then that
she was to be married and he thought she was and never asked anybody
anything about her. And now everything has come right. And I had a
hand in bringing it about. Perhaps, as Mrs. Lynde says, everything is
foreordained and it was bound to happen anyway. But even so, it's nice
to think one was an instrument used by predestination. Yes indeed, it's
very romantic."

"I can't see that it's so terribly romantic at all," said Marilla rather
crisply. Marilla thought Anne was too worked up about it and had plenty
to do with getting ready for college without "traipsing" to Echo Lodge
two days out of three helping Miss Lavendar. "In the first place two
young fools quarrel and turn sulky; then Steve Irving goes to the States
and after a spell gets married up there and is perfectly happy from all
accounts. Then his wife dies and after a decent interval he thinks he'll
come home and see if his first fancy'll have him. Meanwhile, she's been
living single, probably because nobody nice enough came along to want
her, and they meet and agree to be married after all. Now, where is the
romance in all that?"

"Oh, there isn't any, when you put it that way," gasped Anne, rather
as if somebody had thrown cold water over her. "I suppose that's how
it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through
poetry . . . and _I_ think it's nicer . . ." Anne recovered herself and
her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed . . . "to look at it through
poetry."

Marilla glanced at the radiant young face and refrained from further
sarcastic comments. Perhaps some realization came to her that after all
it was better to have, like Anne, "the vision and the faculty divine"
. . . that gift which the world cannot bestow or take away, of looking at
life through some transfiguring . . . or revealing? . . . medium, whereby
everything seemed apparelled in celestial light, wearing a glory and
a freshness not visible to those who, like herself and Charlotta the
Fourth, looked at