She and Peter Wright were engaged . Then came their mysterious quarrel , concerning the cause of which kith and kin on both sides were left in annoying ignorance . Of the results they were not ignorant . Nancy promptly packed up and left Avonlea seven hundred miles behind her . She went to a hospital in Montreal and studied nursing . In the twenty years that followed she had never even revisited Avonlea . Her sudden descent on it this summer was a whim born of a moment 's homesick longing for this same old garden . She had not thought about Peter . In very truth , she had thought little about Peter for the last fifteen years . She supposed that she had forgotten him . But now , sitting on the old doorstep , where she had often sat in her courting days , with Peter lounging on a broad stone at her feet , something tugged at her heartstrings . She looked over the valley to the light in the kitchen of the Wright farmhouse , and pictured Peter sitting there , lonely and uncared for , with naught but the cold comfort of his own providing . `` Well , he should have got married , '' she said snappishly . `` I am not going to worry because he is a lonely old bachelor when all these years I have supposed him a comfy Benedict . Why does n't he hire him a housekeeper , at least ? He can afford it ; the place looks prosperous . Ugh ! I 've a fat bank account , and I 've seen almost everything in the world worth seeing ; but I 've got several carefully hidden gray hairs and a horrible conviction that grammar is n't one of the essential things in life after all . Well , I 'm not going to moon out here in the dew any longer . I 'm going in to read the smartest , frilliest , frothiest society novel in my trunk . ''
In the week that followed XXXXX enjoyed herself after her own fashion .
Avonlea Benedict Nancy Peter Wright days frilliest heartstrings left years