The sky at the end of August was stunningly blue and everywhere there was a scent of ripe, red-cheeked apples, as well as the golden shimmering grain in the fields, as harvest was almost done.
Matthew had driven the cows from the upper field, and they grazed the tasty hay near Blythe's farm. Sometimes Matthew would catch a glimpse of the figure of John Blythe, visible on the other side of the fence. He always politely raised his little hat, with his tanned arm, and Matthew wondered what exactly had gone wrong between him and his sister, but of course it was impossible to ask.
One afternoon only John Blythe no longer arrived in the Green Gables yard, to lean against a tree and wait until Marilla was free from her chores, so they could go for an evening walk.
And the only time Matthew had almost worked up the courage to ask, Marilla had given her brother an extremely dismissive look and said sharply in an unanswerable tone, "Matthew, I don't want to talk about it, please. John, John Blythe is just a neighbor to us from now on like the rest of the Avonlea settlement."
Sometimes in the evenings, especially on those crystal clear spring evenings when the white lilac bloomed on the outskirts of Avonlea, Matthew noticed that after the chores were done, Marilla was sitting on the front steps, and seemed to be quietly humming something, but as years passed that eventually ended.
Rachel Lynde and Marilla would argue in the kitchen about the best ways to use the apple harvest, and hearing the lively exchange through the open window, Matthew tapped his pipe empty against the tree stump and listened, munching on the delicious apple, thinking that the life he and Marilla had built here suited them.
Enough silence and space.
Marilla was always careful about Matthew, always had been, in that caution there was an extreme, strong love twined in.
Rachel's voice came through the window clearly, "Marilla, you Cuthberts have always been strange in your own way, building this house so far away. There's nothing but trees and nature here, and the Barrys, but they're not really close either, even though they're relatively close neighbors, and then it's us."
Marilla replied in her quietly ironic way with a hint of tempered asperity in her tone, "Rachel, as I've often told you over the years. I'm happy here with Matthew, if the situation ever changes you'll hear about it, I can promise."
As the years passed, Rachel and Thomas Lynde's brood of children increased year by year, and to his quiet astonishment one morning Matthew discovered that his once dark brown hair had turned steel gray.
Marilla was slim, angular, and punctual, and her brown hair too got its usual share of grey stripes as years turned. There was sometimes a look in her eyes that Matthew interpreted as loneliness.
The siblings' life and everyday life in Green Gables went on at their own pace.
Until that early summer evening, when Matthew drove frantically to pick up a boy from the orphanage at Carmody station, and found a red-haired girl instead of a boy.
When Anne arrived, all of Green Gables seemed to change, already that first summer. And when August came, Anne and Diana's laughter echoed brightly in the woods, and none of them were lonely anymore.
A/N: Homage snippet to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, as they do deserve it.