she was so absorbed in "drinking it in" that Anne
took the left turning when they came to a fork in the road. She should
have taken the right, but ever afterward she counted it the most
fortunate mistake of her life. They came out finally to a lonely, grassy
road, with nothing in sight along it but ranks of spruce saplings.

"Why, where are we?" exclaimed Diana in bewilderment. "This isn't the
West Grafton road."

"No, it's the base line road in Middle Grafton," said Anne, rather
shamefacedly. "I must have taken the wrong turning at the fork. I
don't know where we are exactly, but we must be all of three miles from
Kimballs' still."

"Then we can't get there by five, for it's half past four now," said
Diana, with a despairing look at her watch. "We'll arrive after they
have had their tea, and they'll have all the bother of getting ours over
again."

"We'd better turn back and go home," suggested Anne humbly. But Diana,
after consideration, vetoed this.

"No, we may as well go and spend the evening, since we have come this
far."

A few yards further on the girls came to a place where the road forked
again.

"Which of these do we take?" asked Diana dubiously.

Anne shook her head.

"I don't know and we can't afford to make any more mistakes. Here is a
gate and a lane leading right into the wood. There must be a house at
the other side. Let us go down and inquire."

"What a romantic old lane this it," said Diana, as they walked along its
twists and turns. It ran under patriarchal old firs whose branches met
above, creating a perpetual gloom in which nothing except moss could
grow. On either hand were brown wood floors, crossed here and there
by fallen lances of sunlight. All was very still and remote, as if the
world and the cares of the world were far away.

"I feel as if we were walking through an enchanted forest," said Anne in
a hushed tone. "Do you suppose we'll ever find our way back to the
real world again, Diana? We shall presently come to a palace with a
spellbound princess in it, I think."

Around the next turn they came in sight, not indeed of a palace, but of
a little house almost as surprising as a palace would have been in this
province of conventional wooden farmhouses, all as much alike in general
characteristics as if they had grown from the same seed. Anne stopped
short in rapture and Diana exclaimed, "Oh, I know where we are now.
That is the little stone house where Miss Lavendar Lewis l