Anne Of Ingleside √ (Project K.)

CHAPTER 41

"Had a nice evening?" asked Gilbert, more absently than ever as he helped her on the train.

"Oh, lovely," said Anne . . . who felt that she had, in Jane Welsh Carlyle's splendid phrase, "spent the evening under a harrow."

"What made you do your hair that way?" said Gilbert still absently.

"It's the new fashion."

"Well, it doesn't suit you. It may be all right for some hair but not for yours."

"Oh, it is too bad my hair is red," said Anne icily.

Gilbert thought he was wise in dropping a dangerous subject. Anne, he reflected, had always been a bit sensitive about her hair. He was too tired to talk, anyway. He leaned his head back on the car seat and shut his eyes. For the first time Anne noticed little glints of grey in the hair above his ears. But she hardened her heart.

They walked silently home from the Glen station by the short-cut to Ingleside. The air was filled with the breath of spruce and spice fern. The moon was shining over dew-wet fields. They passed an old deserted house with sad and broken windows that had once danced with light. "Just like my life," thought Anne. Everything seemed to have for her some dreary meaning now. The dim white moth that fluttered past them on the lawn was, she thought sadly, like a ghost of faded love. Then she caught her foot in a croquet hoop and nearly fell headlong into a clump of phlox. What on earth did the children mean by leaving it there? She would tell them what she thought about it tomorrow!

Gilbert only said, "O-o-o-ps!" and steadied her with a hand. Would he have been so casual about it if it had been Christine who had tripped while they were puzzling out the meaning of moonrises?

Gilbert rushed off to his office the moment they were inside the house and Anne went silently up to their room, where the moonlight was lying on the floor, still and silver and cold. She went to the open window and looked out. It was evidently the Carter Flaggs' dog's night to howl and he was putting his heart into it. The lombardy leaves glistened like silver in the moonlight. The house about her seemed whispering tonight . . . whispering sinisterly, as if it were no longer her friend.

Anne felt sick and cold and empty. The gold of life had turned to withered leaves. Nothing had any meaning any longer. Everything seemed remote and unreal.

Far down the tide was keeping its world-old tryst with the shore. She could . . . now that Norman Douglas had cut down his spruce bush . . . see her little House of Dreams. How happy they had been there . . . when it was enough just to be together in their own home, with their visions, their caresses, their silences! All the colour of the morning in their lives . . . Gilbert looking at her with that smile in his eyes he kept for her alone . . . finding every day a new way of saying, "I love you" . . . sharing laughter as they shared sorrow.

And now . . . Gilbert had grown tired of her. Men had always been like that . . . always would be. She had thought Gilbert was an exception but now she knew the truth. And how was she going to adjust her life to it?

"There are the children, of course," she thought dully. "I must go on living for them. And nobody must know . . . nobody. I will not be pitied."

What was that? Somebody was coming up the stairs, three steps at a time, as Gilbert used to do long ago in the House of Dreams . . . as he had not done for a long time now. It couldn't be Gilbert . . . it was!

He burst into the room . . . he flung a little packet on the table . . . he caught Anne by the waist and waltzed her round and round the room like a crazy schoolboy, coming to rest at last breathlessly in a silver pool of moonlight.