Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the twenty-sixth chapter of Anne's House of Dreams.

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Today we'll be continuing Anne's House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Chapter 26 owen Ford's confession.

I'm so sorry Gilbert is away, said Anne.

He had to go.

Alan Lyons at the Glenn has met with a serious accident.

He will not likely be home till very late, but he told me to tell you he'd be up and over early enough in the morning to see you before you left.

It's too provoking.

Susan and I had planned such a nice little jamboree for your last night.

Here she was, sitting beside the garden.

Brook on the little rustic seat Gilbert had built.

Owen Ford stood before her, leaning against.

The bronze column of a yellow birch.

He was very pale, and his face.

Bore the marks of the preceding sleepless night and glancing up at him, wondered.

If, after all, his summer had brought him the strength it should had he.

Worked too hard over his book.

She remembered that for a week he had not been looking well.

I'm rather glad the doctor is away, said Owen slowly.

I wanted to see you alone, Missus Blythe.

There's something I must tell somebody or I think it will drive me mad.

I've been trying for a week to look it in the face, and I can't.

I know I can trust you.

And besides, you will understand.

A woman with eyes like yours always understands.

You are one of the folks people instinctively tell things to.

Mrs.

Blithe.

I love Leslie.

Love her?

That seems too weak a word.

His voice suddenly broke with the suppressed passion of his utterance.

He turned his head away and hid.

His face on his arm.

His whole form shook and sat looking at him, pale and aghast.

She had never thought of this, and.

Yet how was it?

She had never thought of it.

It now seemed a natural and inevitable thing.

She wondered at her own blindness.

But but things like this did not happen in four winds.

Elsewhere in the world, human passions might set at defiance, human conventions and laws, but not here.

Surely leslie had kept summer borders off.

And on for ten years, and nothing like this had happened.

But perhaps they had not been like Owen Ford.

And the vivid living Leslie of this summer was not the cold stolen girl of other years.

Oh, somebody should have thought of this.

Why hadn't Miss Cornelia thought of it?

Miss Cornelia was always ready enough to.

Sound to the alarm where men were concerned.

Anne felt an unreasonable resentment against Miss.

Cornelia, and she gave a little inward groan.

No matter who was to blame, the mischief was done.

And Leslie?

What of Leslie?

It was for Leslie and felt most concerned.

Does Leslie know this, Mr.

Ford?

She asked quietly.

No, no, unless she has guessed it.

You surely don't think I'd be CAD and scoundrel enough to tell her?

Mrs.

Blythe, I couldn't help loving her, that's all, and my misery is greater than I can bear.

Does she care?

Asked Anne.

The moment the question crossed her lips.

She felt that she should not have asked it.

Owen Ford answered it with over eager protest.

No, no, of course not.

But I could make her care if she were free.

I know I could.

She does care, and he knows it, thought Anne aloud.

She said sympathetically but decidedly, but she is not free, Mr.

Ford.

And the only thing you can do is to go away in silence and leave her to her own life.

I know.

I know.

Groaned.

Owen.

He sat down on the grassy bank and stared moodily into the amber water beneath him.

I know there's nothing to do.

Nothing but to say conventionally goodbye, Mrs.

Moore.

Thank you for all your kindness to me this summer, just as I would have said it to the sunsy bustling, keen eyed housewife I expected her to be when I came.

Then I'll pay my board money, like any honest border, and go.

Oh, it's very simple, no doubt, no perplexity.

A straight road to the end of the world, and I'll walk it.

But you needn't fear that I won't missus Blythe.

But it would be easier to walk over red hot plowshares.

Anne flinched with the pain of his.

Voice, and there was so little she.

Could say that would be adequate to the situation.

Blame was out of the question.

Advice was not needed.

Sympathy was mocked by the man's stark agony she could only feel with him in a maze of compassion and regret.

Her heart ached for Leslie.

Had not that poor girl suffered enough without this?

It wouldn't be so hard to go and leave her if she were only.

Happy, resumed Owen passionately.

But to think of her living death to realize what it is to which I do leave her.

That is the worst of all.

I would give my life to make her happy and I can do nothing even to help her.

Nothing.

She is bound forever to that poor wretch with nothing to look forward to but growing old in a succession of empty, meaningless, barren years.

It drives me mad to think of it, but I must go through my life never seeing her but always knowing what she is enduring.

It's hideous.

Hideous.

It is very hard, said Anne thoroughly.

We her friends here all know how.

Hard it is for her.

And she is so richly fitted for.

Life, said Owen, rebelliously.

Her beauty is the least of her dower and she is the most beautiful woman I've ever known.

That laugh of hers.

I've angled all summer to evoke that laugh just for the delight of hearing it.

And her eyes, they are as deep and blue as the gulf out there.

I never saw such blueness and gold.

Did you ever see her hair down, Mrs.

Blithe?

No.

I did once.

I had gone down to the Point to go fishing with Captain Jim but it was too rough to go out, so I came back.

She had taken the opportunity of what she expected to be an afternoon alone to wash her hair and she was standing on the veranda in the sunshine to dry it.

It fell all about her to her feet in a fountain of living gold.

When she saw me, she hurried in and the wind caught her hair and swirled it around her denay in her cloud.

Somehow, just then, the knowledge that I loved her came home to me and realized that I had loved her from the moment I first saw her standing against the darkness in that glow of light.

And she must live on here petting and soothing, d*** pinching and saving for a mere existence while I spend my life longing vainly for her and debarred by that very fact from even giving her the little help a friend might.

I walked the shore last night, almost till dawn and thrashed it all out over and over again.

And yet, in spite of everything I can't find it in my heart to be sorry that I came to four winds.

It seems to me that bad as everything is, it would be still worse never to have known Leslie.

It's burning, searing pain to love her and leave her but not to have loved her is unthinkable.

I suppose all this sounds very crazy.

All these terrible emotions always do sound.

Foolish when we put them into our inadequate words.

They're not meant to be spoken, only felt and endured.

I shouldn't have spoken, but it has helped some.

At least it has given me strength to go away respectably.

Tomorrow morning, without making a scene.

You'll write me now and then, won't you, Mrs.

Blithe?

And give me what news there is to give of her.

Yes, said Anne.

Oh, I'm so sorry you are going.

We'll miss you so.

We've all been such friends.

If it were not for this, you could come back other summers perhaps even yet.

By and by, when you've forgotten.

Perhaps I shall never forget.

And I shall never come back.

To four winds, said Owen briefly.

Silence and twilight fell over the garden.

Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar.

The wind of evening in the poplar sounded like some sad, weird old rune, some broken dream of old memories.

A slender, shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maze and emerald and pilling rose of the western.

Sky which brought out every leaf and.

Twig and dark tremulous elfin loveliness.

Isn't that beautiful?

Said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man who puts a certain conversation behind him.

It's so beautiful that it hurts me, said Anne softly.

Perfect things like that always did hurt me.

I remember I called it the queer ache when I was a child.

What is the reason that pain like this seems inseparable from perfection?

Is it the pain of finality when we realize that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?

Perhaps, said Owen dreamily.

It is the prisoned infinite in us calling out to its kindred.

Infinite as expressed in that visible perfection.

You seem to have a cold in the head.

Better rub some tallow on your nose when you go to bed, said Miss Cornelia, who had come in through the little gate between the furs in time to catch Owen's last remark.

Ms.

Cornelia liked Owen, but it was.

A matter of principle with her to.

Visit any highfalutin language from a man with a snub.

Ms.

Cornelia personated the comedy that ever.

Peeps around the corner at the tragedy of life.

Anne, whose nerves had been rather strained, laughed hysterically, and even Owen smiled.

Certainly sentiment and passion had a way of shrinking out of sight in Miss Cornelia's presence.

And yet, to Anne, nothing seemed quite as hopeless and dark and painful as it had seemed a few moments before.

But sleep was far from her eyes that night.

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Again, my name is Brie Carlyle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of Anne's House of Dreams.

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