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 anything else for her floors. They are pretty. I made them of the nicest rags, and braided them in stripes. It was such company these last few winters. And I’ll make her enough blue plum preserve to stock her jam closet for a year. It seems real strange. Those blue plum trees hadn’t even a blossom for three years, and I thought they might as well be cut down. And this last spring they were white, and such a crop of plums I never remember at Green Gables.”

“Well, thank goodness that Anne and Gilbert really are going to be married after all. It’s what I’ve always prayed for,” said Mrs. Rachel, in the tone of one who is comfortably sure that her prayers have availed much. “It was a great relief to find out that she really didn’t mean to take the Kingsport man. He was rich, to be sure, and Gilbert is poor—at least, to begin with; but then he’s an Island boy.”

“He’s Gilbert Blythe,” said Marilla contentedly. Marilla would have died the death before she would have put into words the thought that was always in the background of her mind whenever she had looked at Gilbert from his childhood up—the thought that, had it not been for her own wilful pride long, long ago, he might have been her son. Marilla felt that, in some strange way, his marriage with Anne would put right that old mistake. Good had come out of the evil of the ancient bitterness.

As for Anne herself, she was so happy that she almost felt frightened. The gods, so says the old