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 Mrs. Lynde drove home, meeting several people on the road and stopping to tell them about the hall. The news flew like wildfire. Gilbert Blythe, poring over a text book at home, heard it from his father’s hired boy at sunset, and rushed breathlessly to Green Gables, joined on the way by Fred Wright. They found Diana Barry, Jane Andrews, and Anne Shirley, despair personified, at the yard gate of Green Gables, under the big leafless willows.

“It isn’t true surely, Anne?” exclaimed Gilbert.

“It true,” answered Anne, looking like the muse of tragedy. “Mrs. Lynde called on her way from Carmody to tell me. Oh, it is simply dreadful! is the use of trying to improve anything?”

“What is dreadful?” asked Oliver Sloane, arriving at this moment with a bandbox he had brought from town for Marilla.

“Haven’t you heard?” said Jane wrathfully. “Well, its simply this Joshua Pye   a deep, brilliant blue, the shade they use for painting carts and wheelbarrows. And Mrs. Lynde says it is the most hideous colour for a building, especially when combined with a red roof, that she ever saw or imagined. You could simply have knocked me down with a feather when I heard it. It’s heart-breaking, after all the trouble we’ve had.”

“How on earth could such a mistake have happened?” wailed Diana.

The blame of this unmerciful disaster was Rh