."

"I must be getting old, Gilbert." Mrs. Blythe laughed a trifle
ruefully. "People are beginning to tell me I look so young. They never
tell you that when you are young. But I shall not worry over my silver
thread. I never liked red hair. Gilbert, did I ever tell you of that
time, years ago at Green Gables, when I dyed my hair? Nobody but
Marilla and I knew about it."

"Was that the reason you came out once with your hair shingled to the
bone?"

"Yes. I bought a bottle of dye from a German Jew pedlar. I fondly
expected it would turn my hair black--and it turned it green. So it had
to be cut off."

"You had a narrow escape, Mrs. Dr. dear," exclaimed Susan. "Of course
you were too young then to know what a German was. It was a special
mercy of Providence that it was only green dye and not poison."

"It seems hundreds of years since those Green Gables days," sighed Mrs.
Blythe. "They belonged to another world altogether. Life has been cut
in two by the chasm of war. What is ahead I don't know--but it can't be
a bit like the past. I wonder if those of us who have lived half our
lives in the old world will ever feel wholly at home in the new."

"Have you noticed," asked Miss Oliver, glancing up from her book, "how
everything written before the war seems so far away now, too? One feels
as if one was reading something as ancient as the Iliad. This poem of
Wordsworth's--the Senior class have it in their entrance work--I've
been glancing over it. Its classic calm and repose and the beauty of
the lines seem to belong to another planet, and to have as little to do
with the present world-welter as the evening star."

"The only thing that I find much comfort in reading nowadays is the
Bible," remarked Susan, whisking her biscuits into the oven. "There are
so many passages in it that seem to me exactly descriptive of the Huns.
Old Highland Sandy declares that there is no doubt that the Kaiser is
the Anti-Christ spoken of in Revelations, but I do not go as far as
that. It would, in my humble opinion, Mrs. Dr. dear, be too great an
honour for him."

Early one morning, several days later, Miranda Pryor slipped up to
Ingleside, ostensibly to get some Red Cross sewing, but in reality to
talk over with sympathetic Rilla troubles that were past bearing alone.
She brought her dog with her--an over-fed, bandy-legged little animal
very dear to her heart because Joe Milgrave had given it to her when it
was a puppy. Mr. Pryor regarde