Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

Chapter 37

614 688

it by his grave—as if I were doing something that must please him in taking it there to be near him. I19 I must go home now. Marilla is all alone and she gets lonely at twilight.”

“She will be lonelier still, I fear, when you go away again to college,” said Mrs. Allan.

Anne did not reply; she said good-night and went slowly back to Green Gables. Marilla was sitting on the front-door-steps and Anne sat down beside her. The door was open behind them, held back by a big pink conch-shell with hints of sea-sunsets in its smooth inner convolutions.

Anne gathered some sprays of pale yellow honeysuckle and

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note I19
I hope he has roses like them in heaven. Perhaps the souls of all those little white roses that he has loved so many summers were all there to meet him.



PHOTO ANNOTATION

close-up of a large conch shell with a cream-coloured by rough-textured outside and a pink inside

"conch shell": There are no conch shells (naturally occurring) on P.E.I. But many Cavendish (and Avonlea, no doubt) relatives and friends were seafaring folk, and brought back souvenirs of other shores. One can easily imagine the Macneills — like the Cuthberts — holding open a door with a beautifully coloured shell. In Emily of New Moon, the autobiographical Emily Byrd Starr is finally given a small room of her own (very like the "lookout room" of the Macneill homestead) where she finds her dead mother’s exotic dried grasses and a "pot-bellied bottle filled with West Indian shells."