teacher tells you.
I ll try to be a model pupil, agreed Anne dolefully. There won t be
much fun in it, I expect. Mr. Phillips said Minnie Andrews was a model
pupil and there isn t a spark of imagination or life in her. She is
just dull and poky and never seems to have a good time. But I feel so
depressed that perhaps it will come easy to me now. I m going round by
the road. I couldn t bear to go by the Birch Path all alone. I should
weep bitter tears if I did.
Anne was welcomed back to school with open arms. Her imagination had
been sorely missed in games, her voice in the singing and her dramatic
ability in the perusal aloud of books at dinner hour. Ruby Gillis
smuggled three blue plums over to her during testament reading; Ella May
MacPherson gave her an enormous yellow pansy cut from the covers of a
floral catalogue--a species of desk decoration much prized in Avonlea
school. Sophia Sloane offered to teach her a perfectly elegant new
pattern of knit lace, so nice for trimming aprons. Katie Boulter gave
her a perfume bottle to keep slate water in, and Julia Bell copied
carefully on a piece of pale pink paper scalloped on the edges the
following effusion:
TO ANNE
When twilight drops her curtain down
And pins it with a star
Remember that you have a friend
Though she may wander far.
It s so nice to be appreciated, sighed Anne rapturously to Marilla
that night.
The girls were not the only scholars who appreciated her. When Anne
went to her seat after dinner hour--she had been told by Mr. Phillips to
sit with the model Minnie Andrews--she found on her desk a big luscious
strawberry apple. Anne caught it up all ready to take a bite when she
remembered that the only place in Avonlea where strawberry apples grew
was in the old Blythe orchard on the other side of the Lake of Shining
Waters. Anne dropped the apple as if it were a red-hot coal and
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