ver, dressed in HER
second-best dress and looking exactly as it is proper to look when asked
out to tea. At other times she was wont to run into the kitchen without
knocking; but now she knocked primly at the front door. And when Anne,
dressed in her second best, as primly opened it, both little girls
shook hands as gravely as if they had never met before. This unnatural
solemnity lasted until after Diana had been taken to the east gable to
lay off her hat and then had sat for ten minutes in the sitting room,
toes in position.

"How is your mother?" inquired Anne politely, just as if she had not
seen Mrs. Barry picking apples that morning in excellent health and
spirits.

"She is very well, thank you. I suppose Mr. Cuthbert is hauling potatoes
to the LILY SANDS this afternoon, is he?" said Diana, who had ridden
down to Mr. Harmon Andrews's that morning in Matthew's cart.

"Yes. Our potato crop is very good this year. I hope your father's crop
is good too."

"It is fairly good, thank you. Have you picked many of your apples yet?"

"Oh, ever so many," said Anne forgetting to be dignified and jumping up
quickly. "Let's go out to the orchard and get some of the Red Sweetings,
Diana. Marilla says we can have all that are left on the tree. Marilla
is a very generous woman. She said we could have fruit cake and cherry
preserves for tea. But it isn't good manners to tell your company what
you are going to give them to eat, so I won't tell you what she said we
could have to drink. Only it begins with an R and a C and it's bright
red color. I love bright red drinks, don't you? They taste twice as good
as any other color."

The orchard, with its great sweeping boughs that bent to the ground
with fruit, proved so delightful that the little girls spent most of the
afternoon in it, sitting in a grassy corner where the frost had spared
the green and the mellow autumn sunshine lingered warmly, eating apples
and talking as hard as they could. Diana had much to tell Anne of what
went on in school. She had to sit with Gertie Pye and she hated
it; Gertie squeaked her pencil all the time and it just made
her--Diana's--blood run cold; Ruby Gillis had charmed all her warts
away, true's you live, with a magic pebble that old Mary Joe from the
Creek gave her. You had to rub the warts with the pebble and then throw
it away over your left shoulder at the time of the new moon and the
warts would all go. Charlie Sloane's name was written up