of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary. Yet with all
this Mrs. Rachel found abundant time to sit for hours at her kitchen
window, knitting cotton warp quilts--she had knitted sixteen of them,
as Avonlea housekeepers were wont to tell in awed voices--and keeping
a sharp eye on the main road that crossed the hollow and wound up
the steep red hill beyond. Since Avonlea occupied a little triangular
peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with water on two
sides of it, anybody who went out of it or into it had to pass over that
hill road and so run the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel s all-seeing
eye.
She was sitting there one afternoon in early June. The sun was coming in
at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house
was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of
bees. Thomas Lynde--a meek little man whom Avonlea people called Rachel
Lynde s husband --was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field
beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert ought to have been sowing his on
the big red brook field away over by Green Gables. Mrs. Rachel knew
that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening
before in William J. Blair s store over at Carmody that he meant to sow
his turnip seed the next afternoon. Peter had asked him, of course, for
Matthew Cuthbert had never been known to volunteer information about
anything in his whole life.
And yet here was Matthew Cuthbert, at half-past three on the afternoon
of a busy day, placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill;
moreover, he wore a white collar and his best suit of clothes, which was
plain proof that he was going out of Avonlea; and he had the buggy
and the sorrel mare, which betokened that he was going a considerable
distance. Now, where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going
there?
Had it been any other man in Avonlea, Mrs. Rachel, deftly putting this
and that together, might have given a pretty good guess as to both
questions. But Matthew so rarely went from home that it must be
something pressing and unusual which was taking him; he was the shyest
man alive and hated to have to go among strangers or to any place where
he might have to talk. Matthew, dressed up with a white collar and
driving in a buggy, was something that didn t happen often. Mrs. Rachel,
ponder as she might, could make nothing of it and her afternoon s
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