Lucy Maud Montgomery - The Complete Novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery - 20 Titles in One Volume - Including Anne of Green Gables Series, Emily Starr Trilogy, The Blue Castle, The Story Girl & Pat of Silver Bush Series

Hazel fluffed out her hair and put on her hat, a hat with a rosy lining to its brim and rosy blossoms around it. She looked so distractingly pretty in it that Anne kissed her impulsively. “You’re the prettiest thing, darling,” she said admiringly.

Hazel stood very still.

Then she lifted her eyes and stared clear through the ceiling of the tower room, clear through the attic above it, and sought the stars.

“I shall never, never forget this wonderful moment, Miss Shirley,” she murmured rapturously. “I feel that my beauty … if I have any … has been consecrated. Oh, Miss Shirley, you don’t know how really terrible it is to have a reputation for beauty and to be always afraid that when people meet you they will not think you as pretty as you were reported to be. It’s torture. Sometimes I just die of mortification because I fancy I can see they’re disappointed. Perhaps it’s only my imagination … I’m so imaginative … too much so for my own good, I fear. I imagined I was in love with Terry, you see. Oh, Miss Shirley, can you smell the apple-blossom fragrance?”

Having a nose, Anne could.

“Isn’t it just divine? I hope heaven will be all flowers. One could be good if one lived in a lily, couldn’t one?”

“I’m afraid it might be a little confining,” said Anne perversely.

“Oh, Miss Shirley, don’t … don’t be sarcastic with your little adorer. Sarcasm just shrivels me up like a leaf.”

“I see she hasn’t talked you quite to death,” said Rebecca Dew, when Anne had come back after seeing Hazel to the end of Spook’s Lane. “I don’t see how you put up with her.”

“I like her, Rebecca, I really do. I was a dreadful little chatterbox when I was a child. I wonder if I sounded as silly to the people who had to listen to me as Hazel does sometimes.”

“I didn’t know you when you was a child but I’m sure you didn’t,” said Rebecca. “Because you would mean what you said no matter how you expressed it and Hazel Marr doesn’t. She’s nothing but skim milk pretending to be cream.”

“Oh, of course she dramatizes herself a bit as most girls do, but I think she means some of the things she says,” said Anne, thinking of Terry. Perhaps it was because she had a rather poor opinion of the said Terry that she believed Hazel was quite in earnest in all she said about him. Anne thought Hazel was throwing herself away on Terry in spite of the ten thousand he was “coming into.” Anne considered Terry a goodlooking, rather weak youth who would fall in love with the first pretty girl who made eyes at him and would, with equal facility, fall in love with the next one if Number One turned him down or left him alone too long.

Anne had seen a good deal of Terry that spring, for Hazel had insisted on her playing gooseberry frequently; and she was destined to see more of him, for Hazel went to visit friends in Kingsport and during her absence Terry rather attached himself to Anne, taking her out for rides and “seeing her home” from places. They called each other “Anne” and “Terry,” for they were about the same age, although Anne felt quite motherly towards him. Terry felt immensely flattered that “the clever Miss Shirley” seemed to like his companionship and he became so sentimental the night of May Connelly’s party, in a moonlit garden, where the shadows of the acacias blew crazily about, that Anne amusedly reminded him of the absent Hazel.

“Oh, Hazel!” said Terry. “That child!”

“You’re engaged to ‘that child,’ aren’t you?” said Anne severely.

“Not really engaged … nothing but some boy-and-girl nonsense. I … I guess I was just swept off my feet by the moonlight.”

Anne did a bit of rapid thinking. If Terry really cared so little for Hazel as this, the child was far better freed from him. Perhaps this was a heavensent opportunity to extricate them both from the silly tangle they had got themselves into and from which neither of them, taking things with all the deadly seriousness of youth, knew how to escape.

“Of course,” went on Terry, misinterpreting her silence. “I’m in a bit of a predicament, I’ll own. I’m afraid Hazel has taken me a little bit too seriously, and I don’t just know the best way to open her eyes to her mistake.”

Impulsive Anne assumed her most maternal look.

“Terry, you are a couple of children playing at being grown up. Hazel doesn’t really care anything more for you than you do for her. Apparently the moonlight affected both of you. She wants to be free but is afraid to tell you so for fear of hurting your feelings. She’s just a bewildered, romantic girl and you’re a boy in love with love, and some day you’ll both have a good laugh at yourselves.”

(“I think I’ve put that very nicely,” thought Anne complacently.)

Terry drew a long breath.

“You’ve taken a weight off my mind, Anne. Hazel’s a sweet little thing, of course, I hated to think of hurting her, but I’ve realized my … our … mistake for some weeks. When one meets a woman … the woman … you’re not going in yet, Anne? Is all this good moonlight to be wasted? You look like a white rose in the moonlight … Anne… .”

But Anne had flown.

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Anne, correcting examination papers in the tower room one mid-June evening, paused to wipe her nose. She had wiped it so often that evening that it was rosy-red and rather painful. The truth was that Anne was the victim of a very severe and very unromantic cold in the head. It would not allow her to enjoy the soft green sky behind the hemlocks of The Evergreens, the silver-white moon hanging over the Storm King, the haunting perfume of the lilacs below her window or the frosty, blue-penciled irises in the vase on her table. It darkened all her past and overshadowed all her future.

“A cold in the head in June is an immoral thing,” she told Dusty Miller, who was meditating on the windowsill. “But in two weeks from today I’ll be in dear Green Gables instead of stewing here over examination papers full of howlers and wiping a worn-out nose. Think of it, Dusty Miller.”

Apparently Dusty Miller thought of it. He may also have thought that the young lady who was hurrying along Spook’s Lane and down the road and along the perennial path looked angry and disturbed and un-June-like. It was Hazel Marr, only a day back from Kingsport, and evidently a much disturbed Hazel Marr, who, a few minutes later, burst stormily into the tower room without waiting for a reply to her sharp knock.

“Why, Hazel dear …” (Kershoo!) … “are you back from Kingsport already? I didn’t expect you till next week.”

“No, I suppose you didn’t,” said Hazel sarcastically. “Yes, Miss Shirley, I am back. And what do I find? That you have been doing your best to lure Terry away from me … and all but succeeding.”

“Hazel!” (Kershoo!)

“Oh, I know it all! You told Terry I didn’t love him … that I wanted to break our engagement … our sacred engagement!”

“Hazel … child!” (Kershoo!)

“Oh, yes, sneer at me … sneer at everything. But don’t try to deny it. You did it … and you did it deliberately.”

“Of course, I did. You asked me to.”

“I … asked … you … to!”

“Here, in this very room. You told me you didn’t love him and could never marry him.”

“Oh, just a mood, I suppose. I never dreamed you’d take me seriously. I thought you would understand the artistic temperament. You’re ages older than I am, of course, but even you can’t have forgotten the crazy ways girls talk … feel. You who pretended to be my friend!”