There was an old garden in the woods beyond Avonlea, where a young wife called Hester Gray had lived and died long before any of us were born. The house had gone. The garden had not. Narcissus and roses came up every spring for nobody.
That was where he asked me, the second time.
The first time, I had said no, and meant it, and been sorry in a way I did not understand. Then another man, handsome and suitable and exactly like the hero of a story, asked me too, and I heard myself refuse him as well, and understood a little better. One summer in those years, Ruby Gillis died — Ruby, who had been the prettiest girl in our class and had always cared more for beaux than for books, and who told me, near the end, that she was frightened. I sat with her a good deal. It made me think about what I wanted, instead of what I imagined.
Then Gilbert took typhoid in the spring, and one night I was told he would not live until morning. I sat up at my window until dawn. In the morning, the hired man from the farm next to the Blythes’ came up the red lane, whistling, and told me the fever had turned.
So when he asked me in Hester Gray’s garden, among flowers that had outlived everyone who planted them, I already knew what I would say. We would have to wait three more years, while he studied medicine and I taught at the high school in Summerside. I did not mind. I had waited much longer than that without knowing what for.