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 38

640 715

The stars twinkled over the pointed firs in the hollow and Diana’s light gleamed through the old gap.

Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joys of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!


TEXT ANNOTATION

"flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it": Cecily Devereaux suggests that Montgomery may have been alluding to lines 361–62 from Whittier’s (1868) poem "Among the Hills" when composing the final passages of this novel: "Flowers spring to blossom where she walks / The careful ways of duty." Montgomery used Whittier’s lines (and the two that followed in that stanza) as the epigraph for the next Anne book, Anne of Avonlea (1909) (see Broadview, p. 332, n. 1). Montgomery was already "pegging away at my new book" (Anne of Avonlea) in January 1908, months before she received the printed copy of Anne of Green Gables on June 20, 1908 (Complete Journals, The P.E.I. Years, Volume 2, 1901-1911, p. 182).

TEXT ANNOTATION

"there was always the bend in the road": By repeating the image of the "bend," Montgomery makes it clear that Anne has made two defining life choices: to welcome change and to trust her optimism.