The letters were tender , intimate , sacred . To Anne , the sweetest of all was the one written after her birth to the father on a brief absence . It was full of a proud young mother 's accounts of `` baby '' -- her cleverness , her brightness , her thousand sweetnesses . `` I love her best when she is asleep and better still when she is awake , '' Bertha Shirley had written in the postscript . Probably it was the last sentence she had ever penned . The end was very near for her . `` This has been the most beautiful day of my life , '' Anne said to Phil that night . `` I 've FOUND my father and mother . Those letters have made them REAL to me . I 'm not an orphan any longer . I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday , sweet and beloved , between its leaves . '' Chapter XXII Spring and Anne Return to Green Gables The firelight shadows were dancing over the kitchen walls at Green Gables , for the spring evening was chilly ; through the open east window drifted in the subtly sweet voices of the night . Marilla was sitting by the fire -- at least , in body . In spirit she was roaming olden ways , with feet grown young . Of late Marilla had thus spent many an hour , when she thought she should have been knitting for the twins . `` I suppose I 'm growing old , '' she said . Yet Marilla had changed but little in the past nine years , save to grow something thinner , and even more angular ; there was a little more gray in the hair that was still twisted up in the same hard knot , with two hairpins -- WERE they the same hairpins ? -- still stuck through it . But her expression was very different ; the something about the mouth which had hinted at a sense of humor had developed wonderfully ; her eyes were gentler and milder , her smile more frequent and tender . Marilla was thinking of her whole past life , her cramped but not unhappy childhood , the jealously hidden dreams and the blighted hopes of her girlhood , the long , gray , narrow , monotonous years of dull middle life that followed .
And the coming of Anne -- the vivid , imaginative , impetuous child with her heart of love , and her world XXXXX fancy , bringing with her color and warmth and radiance , until the wilderness of existence had blossomed like the rose .
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