Rilla of Ingleside

On a warm afternoon in late June, Ingleside lay drowsy and content under its old trees, and Susan Baker felt that the world, on the whole, was being run rather well.Susan had kept house for the Blythe family for many years, and she loved its six children as fiercely as if they were her own.Beside her, Mrs. Blythe — whom the Glen still thought of simply as Anne — and her old friend Miss Cornelia were reading the local news column in the town paper and talking it over item by item.

The Blythe children were nearly grown now.Jem was studying to be a doctor like his father; Walter, who wrote poetry and felt everything deeply, was home from college for the summer; and the twins, Nan and Di, were away at Redmond as well.Shirley was away at school, which left only the youngest, Rilla, still at home all the year round.

Rilla — her real name was Bertha Marilla — was almost fifteen, and she was the one Ingleside child who had never cared for books or lessons.A long illness in childhood had kept her out of school for years, and she had grown up dreamy, vain about her looks, and quietly sure that being clever was overrated.She could not bear to think of growing up; she wanted the world to stay exactly as it was, warm and unhurried, with Rainbow Valley at the foot of the garden and nothing that had to be taken seriously.

Just now her whole heart was fixed on one thing: the dance at the Four Winds lighthouse the following week, which was to be her first grown-up party.She had thought about her dress, and her slippers, and whether anyone would ask her to dance, until there was room in her mind for very little else.The one person she told everything to was Gertrude Oliver, the schoolteacher who boarded at Ingleside — a grave young woman of twenty-eight who was given to strange moods and to dreams she only half believed in.That week Gertrude had woken twice from the same uneasy dream and could not shake the feeling that some shadow was moving toward them all.

Miss Cornelia, however, had no patience with dreams, and turned the talk back to the news.Somewhere among the small print was a short item about a foreign archduke who had been shot in a city that none of them could have found on a map.“Some foreign quarrel,” said Susan comfortably, moving on to the next column. “It is no affair of ours here in Glen St. Mary.”

So the afternoon slipped by, full of small and pleasant things, and no one at Ingleside gave the foreign news a second thought.Rilla ran down to Rainbow Valley in the long golden light, certain that the worst thing that could possibly happen to her was to be left sitting down at the lighthouse dance.It was the last summer of the old, safe world, and not one of them knew it.