alarmed, invaded the room, and insisted on knowing what the trouble was.

"The trouble is, I've got things the matter with my conscience,"
sobbed Anne. "Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I'm so

ashamed of myself. I lost my temper and whipped Anthony Pye."
"I'm glad to hear it," said Marilla with decision. "It's what you

should have done long ago."
"Oh, no, no, Marilla. And I don't see how I can ever look those

children in the face again. I feel that I have humiliated myself
to the very dust. You don't know how cross and hateful and horrid

I was. I can't forget the expression in Paul Irving's eyes. . .he
looked so surprised and disappointed. Oh, Marilla, I HAVE tried so

hard to be patient and to win Anthony's liking. . .and now it has
all gone for nothing."

Marilla passed her hard work-worn hand over the girl's glossy,
tumbled hair with a wonderful tenderness. When Anne's sobs grew

quieter she said, very gently for her,
"You take things too much to heart, Anne. We all make mistakes. . .but

people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody. As for Anthony Pye,
why need you care if he does dislike you? He is the only one."

"I can't help it. I want everybody to love me and it hurts me so
when anybody doesn't. And Anthony never will now. Oh, I just made

an idiot of myself today, Marilla. I'll tell you the whole story."
Marilla listened to the whole story, and if she smiled at certain

parts of it Anne never knew. When the tale was ended she said briskly,
"Well, never mind. This day's done and there's a new one coming

tomorrow, with no mistakes in it yet, as you used to say yourself.
Just come downstairs and have your supper. You'll see if a good

cup of tea and those plum puffs I made today won't hearten you up."
"Plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased," said Anne disconsolately;

but Marilla thought it a good sign that she had recovered sufficiently
to adapt a quotation.

The cheerful supper table, with the twins' bright faces, and
Marilla's matchless plum puffs. . .of which Davy ate four. . .

did "hearten her up" considerably after all. She had a good sleep
that night and and awakened in the morning to find herself and the

world transformed. It had snowed softly and thickly all through
the hours of darkness and the beautiful whiteness, glittering in

the frostysunshine, looked like a mantle of charity cast over all
the mistakes and humiliations of the past.

"Every morn is a fresh beginning,
Every morn is the world made new,"

sang Anne, as she dressed.
Owing to the snow she had to go around by the road to school and

she thought it was certainly an impish coincidence that Anthony Pye
should come ploughing along just as she left the Green Gables lane.

She felt as guilty as if their positions were reversed; but to her
unspeakable astonishment Anthony not only lifted his cap. . .which

he had never done before. . .but said easily,
"Kind of bad walking, ain't it? Can I take those books for you,

teacher?"
Anne surrendered her books and wondered if she could possibly be awake.

Anthony walked on in silence to the school, but when Anne took her books
she smiled down at him. . .not the stereotyped "kind" smile she had so

persistently assumed for his benefit but a sudden outflashing of good
comradeship. Anthony smiled. . .no, if the truth must be told,

Anthony GRINNED back. A grin is not generally supposed to be a
respectful thing; yet Anne suddenly felt that if she had not yet

won Anthony's liking she had, somehow or other, won his respect.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde came up the next Saturday and confirmed this.

"Well, Anne, I guess you've won over Anthony Pye, that's what.
He says he believes you are some good after all, even if you are

a girl. Says that whipping you gave him was `just as good as a man's.'"
"I never expected to win him by whipping him, though," said Anne, a

little mournfully, feeling that her ideals had played her false somewhere.
"It doesn't seem right. I'm sure my theory of kindness can't be wrong."

"No, but the Pyes are an exception to every known rule, that's what,"
declared Mrs. Rachel with conviction.

Mr. Harrison said, "Thought you'd come to it," when he heard it,
and Jane rubbed it in rather unmercifully.

XIII
A Golden Picnic

Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables,
just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the

Haunted Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad's Bubble,
where tiny ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk

wakening up from a nap.
"I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my

birthday on Saturday," said Anne.
"Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!"

"That wasn't my fault," laughed Anne. "If my parents had consulted
me it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be

born in spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the
world with the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that

you were their foster sister. But since I didn't, the next best
thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring. Priscilla is

coming over Saturday and Jane will be home. We'll all four start
off to the woods and spend a golden day making the acquaintance of

the spring. We none of us really know her yet, but we'll meet her
back there as we never can anywhere else. I want to explore all

those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a conviction that
there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really

been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at. We'll make friends
with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts."

"It SOUNDS awfully nice," said Diana, with some inwarddistrust of
Anne's magic of words. "But won't it be very damp in some places yet?"

"Oh, we'll wear rubbers," was Anne's concession to practicalities.
"And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me

prepare lunch. I'm going to have the daintiest things possible. . .
things that will match the spring, you understand. . .little jelly

tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and
yellow icing, and buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches

too, though they're NOT very poetical."
Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic. . .a day of breeze and

blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across
meadow and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a

delicate, flower-starred green.
Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some

of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood,
saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field

where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe
voices and laughter echoed down to him.

"It's so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn't it?" Anne
was saying, with true Anneish philosophy. "Let's try to make this

a really golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back
with delight. We're to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else.

`Begone, dull care!' Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong
in school yesterday."

"How do you know?" gasped Jane, amazed.
"Oh, I know the expression. . .I've felt it often enough on my own

face. But put it out of your mind, there's a dear. It will keep
till Monday. . .or if it doesn't so much the better. Oh, girls,

girls, see that patch of violets! There's something for memory's
picture gallery. When I'm eighty years old. . .if I ever am. . .

I shall shut my eyes and see those violets just as I see them now.
That's the first good gift our day has given us."