facts became
known, but that did not help matters much. Judson chuckled to himself
and defied it, and the Improvers were trying to reconcile themselves to
the prospect of seeing the prettiest part of the Newbridge road defaced
by advertisements, when Anne rose quietly at the president's call
for reports of committees on the occasion of the next meeting of the
Society, and announced that Mr. Judson Parker had instructed her to
inform the Society that he was NOT going to rent his fences to the
Patent Medicine Company.

Jane and Diana stared as if they found it hard to believe their ears.
Parliamentary etiquette, which was generally very strictly enforced in
the A.V.I.S., forbade them giving instant vent to their curiosity, but
after the Society adjourned Anne was besieged for explanations. Anne had
no explanation to give. Judson Parker had overtaken her on the road the
preceding evening and told her that he had decided to humor the A.V.I.S.
in its peculiar prejudice against patent medicine advertisements. That
was all Anne would say, then or ever afterwards, and it was the simple
truth; but when Jane Andrews, on her way home, confided to Oliver Sloane
her firm belief that there was more behind Judson Parker's mysterious
change of heart than Anne Shirley had revealed, she spoke the truth
also.

Anne had been down to old Mrs. Irving's on the shore road the preceding
evening and had come home by a short cut which led her first over the
low-lying shore fields, and then through the beech wood below Robert
Dickson's, by a little footpath that ran out to the main road just above
the Lake of Shining Waters . . . known to unimaginative people as Barry's
pond.

Two men were sitting in their buggies, reined off to the side of the
road, just at the entrance of the path. One was Judson Parker; the other
was Jerry Corcoran, a Newbridge man against whom, as Mrs. Lynde would
have told you in eloquent italics, nothing shady had ever been PROVED.
He was an agent for agricultural implements and a prominent personage
in matters political. He had a finger . . . some people said ALL his
fingers . . . in every political pie that was cooked; and as Canada was
on the eve of a general election Jerry Corcoran had been a busy man
for many weeks, canvassing the county in the interests of his party's
candidate. Just as Anne emerged from under the overhanging beech boughs
she heard Corcoran say, "If you'll vote for Amesbury, Parker . . . well,
I'