window. Mr. Harrison rewarded this concession by going outdoors altogether to smoke in fine weather, and so mutual good-will reigned.
Anne had come over to ask Mrs. Harrison for some of her yellow dahlias. She and Diana were going through to Echo Lodge that evening to help Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth with their final preparations for the morrow’s bridal. Miss Lavendar herself never had dahlias; she did not like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her old-fashioned garden. But flowers of any kind were rather scarce in Avonlea and the neighbouring districts that summer, thanks to Uncle Abe’s storm; and Anne and Diana thought that a certain old cream-coloured stone jug, usually kept sacred to doughnuts, brimmed over with yellow dahlias, would be just the thing to set in a dim angle of the stone house stairs, against the dark background of red hall paper.
“I s’pose you’ll be starting off for college in a fortnight’s time?” continued Mr. Harrison. “Well, we’re going to miss you an awful lot, Emily and me. To be sure, Mrs. Lynde’ll be over there in your place. There ain’t nobody but a substitute can be found for them.”
The irony of Mr. Harrison’s tone is quite untransferable to paper. In spite of his wife’s intimacy with Mrs. Lynde, the best that could be said of the relationship between her and Mr. Harrison, even under the new regime, was that they preserved an armed neutrality.
