good voice and she says I must sing in the
Sunday-school choir after this. You can't think how I was thrilled at
the mere thought. I've longed so to sing in the Sunday-school choir,
as Diana does, but I feared it was an honor I could never aspire to.
Lauretta had to go home early because there is a big concert in the
White Sands Hotel tonight and her sister is to recite at it. Lauretta
says that the Americans at the hotel give a concert every fortnight in
aid of the Charlottetown hospital, and they ask lots of the White
Sands people to recite. Lauretta said she expected to be asked herself
someday. I just gazed at her in awe. After she had gone Mrs. Allan and I
had a heart-to-heart talk. I told her everything--about Mrs. Thomas and
the twins and Katie Maurice and Violetta and coming to Green Gables and
my troubles over geometry. And would you believe it, Marilla? Mrs.
Allan told me she was a dunce at geometry too. You don't know how that
encouraged me. Mrs. Lynde came to the manse just before I left, and what
do you think, Marilla? The trustees have hired a new teacher and it's
a lady. Her name is Miss Muriel Stacy. Isn't that a romantic name? Mrs.
Lynde says they've never had a female teacher in Avonlea before and she
thinks it is a dangerous innovation. But I think it will be splendid
to have a lady teacher, and I really don't see how I'm going to live
through the two weeks before school begins. I'm so impatient to see
her."

CHAPTER XXIII. Anne Comes to Grief in an Affair of Honor

Anne had to live through more than two weeks, as it happened. Almost a
month having elapsed since the liniment cake episode, it was high time
for her to get into fresh trouble of some sort, little mistakes, such as
absentmindedly emptying a pan of skim milk into a basket of yarn balls
in the pantry instead of into the pigs' bucket, and walking clean over
the edge of the log bridge into the brook while wrapped in imaginative
reverie, not really being worth counting.

A week after the tea at the manse Diana Barry gave a party.

"Small and select," Anne assured Marilla. "Just the girls in our class."

They had a very good time and nothing untoward happened until after tea,
when they found themselves in the Barry garden, a little tired of all
their games and ripe for any enticing form of mischief which might
present itself. This presently took the form of "daring."

Daring was the fashionable amusement among the Avonlea small fry