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For the next two months all went well and merrily. Nobody ever said anything more to me about Cecil Fenwick, but the girls all chattered freely to me of their little love affairs, and I became a sort of general confidant for them. It just warmed up the cockles of my heart, and I began to enjoy the Sewing Circle famously. I got a lot of pretty new dresses and the dearest hat, and I went everywhere I was asked and had a good time.

But there is one thing you can be perfectly sure of. If you do wrong you are going to be punished for it sometime, somehow and somewhere. My punishment was delayed for two months, and then it descended on my head and I was crushed to the very dust.

Another new family besides the Mercers had come to Avonlea in the spring–the Maxwells. There were just Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell; they were a middle-aged couple and very well off. Mr. Maxwell had bought the lumber mills, and they lived up at the old Spencer place which had always been “the” place of Avonlea. They lived quietly, and Mrs. Maxwell hardly ever went anywhere because she was delicate. She was out when I called and I was out when she returned my call, so that I had never met her.

It was the Sewing Circle day again–at Sarah Gardiner’s this time. I was late; everybody else was there when I arrived, and the minute I entered the room I knew something had happened, although I couldn’t imagine what. Everybody looked at me in the strangest way. Of course, Wilhelmina Mercer was the first to set her tongue going.

“Oh, Miss Holmes, have you seen him yet?” she exclaimed.

“Seen whom?” I said non-excitedly, getting out my thimble and patterns.

“Why, Cecil Fenwick. He’s here–in Avonlea–visiting his sister, Mrs. Maxwell.”

I suppose I did what they expected me to do. I dropped everything I held, and Josephine Cameron said afterwards that Charlotte Holmes would never be paler when she was in her coffin. If they had just known why I turned so pale!

“It’s impossible!” I said blankly.

“It’s really true,” said Wilhelmina, delighted at this development, as she supposed it, of my romance. “I was up to see Mrs. Maxwell last night, and I met him.”

“It–can’t be–the same–Cecil Fenwick,” I said faintly, because I had to say something.

“Oh, yes, it is. He belongs in Blakely, New Brunswick, and he’s a lawyer, and he’s been out West twenty-two years. He’s oh! so handsome, and just as you described him, except that his hair is quite gray. He has never married–I asked Mrs. Maxwell–so you see he has never forgotten you, Miss Holmes. And, oh, I believe everything is going to come out all right.”

I couldn’t exactly share her cheerful belief. Everything seemed to me to be coming out most horribly wrong. I was so mixed up I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt as if I were in a bad dream–it MUST be a dream–there couldn’t really be a Cecil Fenwick! My feelings were simply indescribable. Fortunately every one put my agitation down to quite a different cause, and they very kindly left me alone to recover myself. I shall never forget that awful afternoon. Right after tea I excused myself and went home as fast as I could go. There I shut myself up in my room, but NOT to write poetry in my blank book. No, indeed! I felt in no poetical mood.

I tried to look the facts squarely in the face. There was a Cecil Fenwick, extraordinary as the coincidence was, and he was here in Avonlea. All my friends–and foes–believed that he was the estranged lover of my youth. If he stayed long in Avonlea, one of two things was bound to happen. He would hear the story I had told about him and deny it, and I would be held up to shame and derision for the rest of my natural life; or else he would simply go away in ignorance, and everybody would suppose he had forgotten me and would pity me maddeningly. The latter possibility was bad enough, but it wasn’t to be compared to the former; and oh, how I prayed–yes, I DID pray about it–that he would go right away. But Providence had other views for me.