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If Josephine had not said that, I might not have gone on. But she did say it, and, moreover, I caught Mary Gillespie and Adella Gilbert exchanging significant smiles. That settled it, and made me quite reckless. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” thought I, and I said with a pensive smile:

“Nobody here knew anything about him, and it was all long, long ago.”

“What was his name?” asked Wilhelmina.

“Cecil Fenwick,” I answered promptly. Cecil had always been my favorite name for a man; it figured quite frequently in the blank book. As for the Fenwick part of it, I had a bit of newspaper in my hand, measuring a hem, with “Try Fenwick’s Porous Plasters” printed across it, and I simply joined the two in sudden and irrevocable matrimony.

“Where did you meet him?” asked Georgie.

I hastily reviewed my past. There was only one place to locate Cecil Fenwick. The only time I had ever been far enough away from Avonlea in my life was when I was eighteen and had gone to visit an aunt in New Brunswick.

“In Blakely, New Brunswick,” I said, almost believing that I had when I saw how they all took it in unsuspectingly. “I was just eighteen and he was twenty-three.”

“What did he look like?” Susette wanted to know.

“Oh, he was very handsome.” I proceeded glibly to sketch my ideal. To tell the dreadful truth, I was enjoying myself; I could see respect dawning in those girls’ eyes, and I knew that I had forever thrown off my reproach. Henceforth I should be a woman with a romantic past, faithful to the one love of her life–a very, very different thing from an old maid who had never had a lover.

“He was tall and dark, with lovely, curly black hair and brilliant, piercing eyes. He had a splendid chin, and a fine nose, and the most fascinating smile!”

“What was he?” asked Maggie.

“A young lawyer,” I said, my choice of profession decided by an enlarged crayon portrait of Mary Gillespie’s deceased brother on an easel before me. He had been a lawyer.

“Why didn’t you marry him?” demanded Susette.

“We quarreled,” I answered sadly. “A terribly bitter quarrel. Oh, we were both so young and so foolish. It was my fault. I vexed Cecil by flirting with another man”–wasn’t I coming on!– “and he was jealous and angry. He went out West and never came back. I have never seen him since, and I do not even know if he is alive. But–but–I could never care for any other man.”

“Oh, how interesting!” sighed Wilhelmina. “I do so love sad love stories. But perhaps he will come back some day yet, Miss Holmes.”

“Oh, no, never now,” I said, shaking my head. “He has forgotten all about me, I dare say. Or if he hasn’t, he has never forgiven me.”

Mary Gillespie’s Susan Jane announced tea at this moment, and I was thankful, for my imagination was giving out, and I didn’t know what question those girls would ask next. But I felt already a change in the mental atmosphere surrounding me, and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation. Repentant? Ashamed? Not a bit of it! I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.

When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly, and said:

“You look like a girl to-night, Miss Charlotte.”

“I feel like one,” I said laughing; and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before–wrote a second poem in the same day. I had to have some outlet for my feelings. I called it “In Summer Days of Long Ago,” and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.