"I'll just step over to Green Gables after tea and find out from Marilla where he's gone and why," Mrs. Rachel finally concluded. "He doesn't generally go to town this time of year and he NEVER visits anyone. If he'd run out of turnip seeds he wouldn't dress up and take the buggy to go for more, and he wasn't driving fast enough to be going for a doctor. Yet something must have happened since last night to start him off on a journey. I'm clean puzzled, that's what, and I won't have a minute's peace of mind or conscience until I know what has taken Matthew Cuthbert out of Avonlea today." After tea, Mrs. Rachel set out and as it was, she did not have far to go. The big, rambling, orchard-embowered house where the Cuthberts lived was a scant quarter of a mile up the road from Lynde's Hollow. Matthew Cuthbert's father, as shy and silent as his son after him, had got as far away as he possibly could from his fellow neighbors without actually retreating into the woods when he founded his homestead. Green Gables was built at the furthest edge of his cleared land and there it was to this day, barely visible from the main road along which all the other Avonlea houses were so sociably situated. Mrs. Rachel Lynde did not call living in such a place LIVING at all.
"It's just STAYING, that's what," she said as she stepped along the deep-rutted, grassy lane bordered with wild rose bushes. "It's no wonder Matthew and Marilla are both a little odd, living away back here by themselves. Trees aren't much company, though dear knows if they were there'd be enough of them. I'd rather look at people. Matthew & Marilla seem contented enough; but then, I suppose, they're used to it." With this thought, Mrs. Rachel stepped out of the lane into the backyard of Green Gables. So green and neat and precise was that yard, set about on one side with great patriarchal willows and the other with prim Lombardies. Not a stray stick or stone was lying about, for Mrs. Rachel would have seen it if there had been any to see. Mrs. Rachel was of the opinion that Marilla Cuthbert swept that yard as often as she swept the inside of her house. One could have easily eaten a meal off the ground in that backyard it was so immaculately kept.
Mrs. Rachel rapped smartly at the kitchen door and stepped in when called upon to do so. The kitchen at Green Gables was a cheerful room--or would have been cheerful if it had not been so painfully clean as to give it the appearance of an unused parlor. Its windows looked east and west. Through the west window, looking out onto the backyard, came a flood of mellow June sunlight. Through the east was the view of white cherry-trees in the orchard and slender birch trees down by the brook, all greened over by a tangle of vines. Here sat Marilla Cuthbert with her knitting, a woman who rarely sat all, and yet there she was with the table behind her all set for supper.
