Page:Anne of the Island (1920).djvu/245

 magics of a March evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white, brooding silence—a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red, overflowing winter sunset.

“I’d go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how,” declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green tips of the pines. “It’s all so wonderful here—this great, white stillness, and those dark trees that always seem to be thinking.”

“‘The woods were God’s first temples,’” quoted Anne softly. “One can’t help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place. I always feel so near Him when I walk among the pines.”

“Anne, I’m the happiest girl in the world,” confessed Phil suddenly.

“So Mr. Blake has asked you to marry him at last?” said Anne calmly.

“Yes. And I sneezed three times while he was asking me. Wasn’t that horrid? But I said ‘yes’ almost before he finished—I was so afraid he might change his mind and stop. I’m besottedly happy. I couldn’t really believe before that Jonas would ever care for frivolous me.”

“Phil, you’re not really frivolous,” said Anne gravely. “’Way down underneath that frivolous ex-