still holding with all my might--to the sofa.

"Let's sit down and talk it over 'comfy,'" he said.

I just confessed the whole shameful business. It was terribly
humiliating, but it served me right. I told him how people were
always twitting me for never having had a beau, and how I had
told them I had; and then I showed him the porous plaster
advertisement.

He heard me right through without a word, and then he threw back
his big, curly, gray head and laughed.

"This clears up a great many mysterious hints I've been receiving
ever since I came to Avonlea," he said, "and finally a Mrs.
Gilbert came to my sister this afternoon with a long farrago of
nonsense about the love affair I had once had with some Charlotte
Holmes here. She declared you had told her about it yourself. I
confess I flamed up. I'm a peppery chap, and I thought--I
thought--oh, confound it, it might as well out: I thought you
were some lank old maid who was amusing herself telling
ridiculous stories about me. When you came into the room I knew
that, whoever was to blame, you were not."

"But I was," I said ruefully. "It wasn't right of me to tell
such a story--and it was very silly, too. But who would ever
have supposed that there could be real Cecil Fenwick who had
lived in Blakely? I never heard of such a coincidence."

"It's more than a coincidence," said Mr. Fenwick decidedly.