There is no use in your trying to make up a match between Peter and me now -- no , nor in slyly inviting him up here to tea some evening , as you are even this moment thinking of doing . '' `` Well , I must go and milk the cows , '' gasped Louisa , rather glad to make her escape . Nancy 's power of thought-reading struck her as uncanny . She felt afraid to remain with her cousin any longer , lest Nancy should drag to light all the secrets of her being . Nancy sat long on the steps after Louisa had gone -- sat until the night came down , darkly and sweetly , over the garden , and the stars twinkled out above the firs . This had been her home in girlhood . Here she had lived and kept house for her father . When he died , Curtis Shaw , newly married to her cousin Louisa , bought the farm from her and moved in . Nancy stayed on with them , expecting soon to go to a home of her own . 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 XXXXX , with naught but the cold comfort of his own providing .
In about above as for from of on to until