Free Anne of Windy Willows by Lucy Maud Montgomery Page B

ill-spelled, ungrammatical tributes to the Captain’s courage and resourcefulness, especially in one wild enterprise of beating round the Horn. But his admiration had not, it seemed, extended to Abraham’s brother Myrom, who was also a captain, but of a different ship.
    Up to Myrom Pringle’s tonight. His wife made him mad, and he up and throwed a glass of water in her face.
    Myrom is home. His ship was burned, and they took to the boats. Nearly starved. In the end they et up Jonas Selkirk, who had shot himself. They lived on him till the
Mary G
. picked them up. Myrom told me this himself. Seemed to think it a good joke.
    Anne shivered over this last entry, which seemed all the more horrifying for Andy’s unimpassioned statement of the grim facts. Then she fell into a reverie. There was nothing in the book that could be of any use to Mrs Stanton, but wouldn’t Miss Sarah and Miss Ellen be interested in it, since it contained so much about their adored old father? Supposing she sent it to them? Duncan Bryce had said she could do as she liked with it.
    No, she wouldn’t. Why should she try to please them or cater for their absurd pride, which was great enough now without any more food? They had set themselves to drive her out of the school, and they were succeeding. They and their clan had beaten her.
    Wilfred took her back to Windy Willows that evening, both of them feeling happy. Anne had talked Duncan Bryce into letting Wilfred finish out his year in High.
    ‘Then I’ll manage Queen’s for a year, and after that teach and educate myself,’ said Wilfred. ‘How can I ever repay you, Miss Shirley? Uncle wouldn’t have listened to anyone else, but he likes you. He said to me out in the barn, “Red-haired women could always do what they liked with me.” But I don’t think it was your hair, Miss Shirley, although it is so beautiful. It was just –
you
.’
    At two o’clock that morning Anne woke up and decided that she would send Andy Bryce’s diary to Maplehurst. After all, she had a bit of liking for the old ladies. And they had so little to make life warm, only their pride in their father. At three she woke again and decided she wouldn’t. Miss Sarah pretending to be deaf, indeed! At four she was in the swithers again. Finally she determined she would send it to them. She wouldn’t be petty. Anne had a horror of being petty, like the Pyes.
    Having settled this, Anne went to sleep again, thinking how lovely it was to wake up in the night and hear the first snowstorm of the winter round your tower, and then snuggle down in your blankets and drift into dreamland again.
    On Monday morning she wrapped the old diary up carefully and sent it to Miss Sarah, with a little note:
    D EAR M ISS P RINGLE ,
    I wonder if you would be interested in this old diary. Mr Bryce gave it to me for Mrs Stanton, who is writing a history of the county, and I don’t think it would be of any use to her, and I thought you might like to have it.
    Yours sincerely,
    A NNE S HIRLEY
    ‘That’s a horribly stiff note,’ thought Anne. ‘But I can’t write naturally to them. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they sent it haughtily back to me.’
    In the fine blue of the early winter evening Rebecca Dew got the shock of her life. The Maplehurst carriage drove along Spook’s Lane, over the powdery snow, and stopped at the front gate. Miss Ellen got out of it, and then, to everyone’s amazement, Miss Sarah, who had not left Maplehurst for ten years.
    ‘They’re coming to the front door!’ gasped Rebecca Dew, panic-stricken.
    ‘Where else would a Pringle come to?’ asked Aunt Kate.
    ‘Of course. Of course. But it sticks,’ said Rebecca tragically. ‘It
does
stick, you know it does. And it hasn’t been opened since we house-cleaned last spring. This
is
the last straw!’
    The front door did stick, but Rebecca Dew wrenched it open with desperate violence, and showed the Maplehurst ladies into the parlour.
    ‘Thank heaven, we’ve