dar's wedding seemed to come as
a sort of crown to it. I suppose Mr. and Mrs. Irving are on the Pacific
coast now."

"It seems to me they have been gone long enough to go around the world,"
sighed Anne.

"I can't believe it is only a week since they were married. Everything
has changed. Miss Lavendar and Mr. and Mrs. Allan gone--how lonely the
manse looks with the shutters all closed! I went past it last night, and
it made me feel as if everybody in it had died."

"We'll never get another minister as nice as Mr. Allan," said Diana,
with gloomy conviction. "I suppose we'll have all kinds of supplies this
winter, and half the Sundays no preaching at all. And you and Gilbert
gone--it will be awfully dull."

"Fred will be here," insinuated Anne slyly.

"When is Mrs. Lynde going to move up?" asked Diana, as if she had not
heard Anne's remark.

"Tomorrow. I'm glad she's coming--but it will be another change. Marilla
and I cleared everything out of the spare room yesterday. Do you know,
I hated to do it? Of course, it was silly--but it did seem as if we
were committing sacrilege. That old spare room has always seemed like
a shrine to me. When I was a child I thought it the most wonderful
apartment in the world. You remember what a consuming desire I had to
sleep in a spare room bed--but not the Green Gables spare room. Oh, no,
never there! It would have been too terrible--I couldn't have slept a
wink from awe. I never WALKED through that room when Marilla sent me in
on an errand--no, indeed, I tiptoed through it and held my breath, as if
I were in church, and felt relieved when I got out of it. The pictures
of George Whitefield and the Duke of Wellington hung there, one on each
side of the mirror, and frowned so sternly at me all the time I was in,
especially if I dared peep in the mirror, which was the only one in the
house that didn't twist my face a little. I always wondered how Marilla
dared houseclean that room. And now it's not only cleaned but stripped
bare. George Whitefield and the Duke have been relegated to the upstairs
hall. 'So passes the glory of this world,'" concluded Anne, with a
laugh in which there was a little note of regret. It is never pleasant
to have our old shrines desecrated, even when we have outgrown them.

"I'll be so lonesome when you go," moaned Diana for the hundredth time.
"And to think you go next week!"

"But we're together still," said Anne cheerily. "We mustn't let next
week rob u