d Stella is teaching
in Vancouver. I have no other 'kindred soul' and I won't have a
bridesmaid who isn't."

"But you are going to wear a veil, aren't you?" asked Diana, anxiously.

"Yes, indeedy. I shouldn't feel like a bride without one. I remember
telling Matthew, that evening when he brought me to Green Gables, that
I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would
ever want to marry me--unless some foreign missionary did. I had an
idea then that foreign missionaries couldn't afford to be finicky in
the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among
cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla
married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those daydreams we once
planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best dressed man I ever
met, and he raved over Priscilla's 'ethereal, golden beauty.' But of
course there are no cannibals in Japan."

"Your wedding dress is a dream, anyhow," sighed Diana rapturously.
"You'll look like a perfect queen in it--you're so tall and slender.
How DO you keep so slim, Anne? I'm fatter than ever--I'll soon have no
waist at all."

"Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination," said
Anne. "At all events, Mrs. Harmon Andrews can't say to you what she
said to me when I came home from Summerside, 'Well, Anne, you're just
about as skinny as ever.' It sounds quite romantic to be 'slender,'
but 'skinny' has a very different tang."

"Mrs. Harmon has been talking about your trousseau. She admits it's as
nice as Jane's, although she says Jane married a millionaire and you
are only marrying a 'poor young doctor without a cent to his name.'"

Anne laughed.

"My dresses ARE nice. I love pretty things. I remember the first
pretty dress I ever had--the brown gloria Matthew gave me for our
school concert. Before that everything I had was so ugly. It seemed
to me that I stepped into a new world that night."

"That was the night Gilbert recited 'Bingen on the Rhine,' and looked
at you when he said, 'There's another, NOT a sister.' And you were so
furious because he put your pink tissue rose in his breast pocket! You
didn't much imagine then that you would ever marry him."

"Oh, well, that's another instance of predestination," laughed Anne, as
they went down the garret stairs.

CHAPTER 2

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS

There was more excitement in the air of Green Gables than there had
ever been before in all it