Well,
that is precisely my opinion. I'd like to be a widow. Then I'd have the
freedom of the unmarried, with the kudos of the married. I could eat my
cake and have it, too. Oh, to be a widow!"

"Nancy!" said Louisa in a shocked tone.

Nancy laughed, a mellow gurgle that rippled through the garden like a
brook.

"Oh, Louisa, I can shock you yet. That was just how you used to say
'Nancy' long ago, as if I'd broken all the commandments at once."

"You do say such queer things," protested Louisa, "and half the time I
don't know what you mean."

"Bless you, dear coz, half the time I don't myself. Perhaps the joy of
coming back to the old spot has slightly turned my brain, I've found my
lost girlhood here. I'm NOT thirty-eight in this garden--it is a flat
impossibility. I'm sweet eighteen, with a waist line two inches smaller.
Look, the sun is just setting. I see he has still his old trick of
throwing his last beams over the Wright farmhouse. By the way, Louisa,
is Peter Wright still living there?"

"Yes." Louisa threw a sudden interested glance at the apparently placid
Nancy.

"Married, I suppose, with half a dozen children?" said Nancy
indifferently, pulling up some more sprigs of mint and pinning them on
her breast. Perhaps the exertion of leaning over to do it flushed her
face. There was more than the Rogerson colour in it, anyhow, and Louisa,
slow though her mental processes might be in some respects, thought
she understood the meaning of a blush as well as the next one. All the
instinct of the matchmaker flamed up in her.

"Indeed he isn't," she said promptly. "Peter Wright has never married.
He has been faithful to your memory, Nancy."

"Ugh! You make me feel as if I were buried up there in the Avonlea
cemetery and had a monument over me with a weeping willow carved on
it," shivered Nancy. "When it is said that a man has been faithful to
a woman's memory it generally means that he couldn't get anyone else to
take him."

"That isn't the case with Peter," protested Louisa. "He is a good match,
and many a woman would have been glad to take him, and would yet. He's
only forty-three. But he's never taken the slightest interest in anyone
since you threw him over, Nancy."

"But I didn't. He threw me over," said Nancy, plaintively, looking afar
over the low-lying fields and a feathery young spruce valley to the
white buildings of the Wright farm, glowing rosily in the sunset light
when all the rest of Avonlea w