I watch Gilbert helplessly as he strides briskly away.

Briskly. It’s a word which always implies brusqueness and a lack of emotion.

But I know there is not lack of emotion in Gilbert’s retreat. I know, instinctively, that I have hurt him irrevocably, and the schoolboy Gil Blythe, with his old floppy cap and striped blouse and bicycle, will never come to me again.

Numbly I make my way upstairs. From Philippa’s room I can hear her gramophone, muffled by the closed door:

Let me call you sweetheart,

I’m in love with you.

Let me hear you whisper

That you love me, too.

Keep that love-light shining

In your eyes so true!

Let me call you sweetheart—

I’m in love with you!

The saccharine voice of the singer offers up Gilbert’s words—of love, of hope, of promise—and flings them back at me, again and again. So I run past Phil's door.

Entering my room at the front of the house, I sink into the window seat—oh, this seat of so many memories!—reading funny notes from Gilbert—penning witty missives back…

I can still see Gilbert’s back from the window.

That does it.

I put my head down on my knees and cry and cry.

Oh, Gil! How could you be so stupid?! Why did you have to go and ruin our friendship like that?

The worst remembrance of what transpired mere minutes ago haunts me:

“Let’s just go on being good friends,” I plead.

Gilbert looks at me, smiling; but it is a false smile; the love-light has drained from his eyes and their deep anguish belies his weak grin. “Good friends, huh? I thought we were kindred spirits…”

We were! We were!

…We are!

The sarcasm, like the colour in his cheeks, drains from his face. "Please say yes," he implores me. Oh! his eyes! Will I ever forget those EYES?

A knock on the door. “Queen Anne?” Phil, glorious in lilac muslin, slips in without waiting for my answer. But I don’t think I could have mustered the strength to speak anyway; my throat is choked with tears.

In the pearly-grey glow of winter, Phil instantly sees the tears upon my cheeks. “What’s the matter, honey?”

I still can not speak. But Phil, being Phil, realizes what has transpired.

“I suppose you’ve gone and refused Gilbert Blythe. You are an idiot, Anne Shirley!”

What right has drifty Philippa Gordon to tell me I lack perspicacity? “Do you call it idiotic to refuse to marry a man I don’t love?” I manage to choke, finally.

But I do love Gil…just as a friend…not in the way he wants me to!

“You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think is love, and you expect the real thing to look like that!” Phil pauses for a moment, surprised. “There—that’s the first sensible thing I’ve ever said in my life. I wonder how I managed it?”

If I had been sunk less into the depths of despair, I might have been able to produce a watery smile at that last remark. But as it is, I can only gasp beseechingly, “Phil, please go away and leave me alone for a little while. My world has tumbled into pieces, and I want to reconstruct it.”

Phil complies, rising from my side and going to the door. But before she exits my room, she asks:

“Without any Gilbert in it?”

A world without any Gilbert in it! I shudder, and not because of the cold beginning to seep in around the windowpanes.

Well, it is Gil’s fault, for going and destroying our friendship like that.

…isn’t it?