The first visit to Echo Lodge begins with a wrong turn and becomes an encounter that changes the lives of both visitors and their unexpected host. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry discover the secluded stone house while trying to find their way along an unfamiliar road; inside, they find Miss Lavendar Lewis, a woman whose solitary tea party is make-believe but whose welcome is real. Their shared imagination turns an accidental arrival into the start of a close, continuing friendship.

The Wrong Turn and the Discovery

Diana Barry is watching the time and urges haste, while Anne Shirley, absorbed in the beauty of the day, wants to take it in as she walks. At a fork, Anne chooses the left-hand road instead of the right. The mistake carries them onto a lonely grassy road in Middle Grafton, several miles from Kimballs’ still. The detour is not merely a delay: it takes them away from their expected route and into a landscape Anne and Diana Barry experience as remote and story-like.

The path runs beneath old firs whose branches meet overhead, leaving the ground dim except for scattered shafts of sunlight. At first, Anne Shirley imagines that they might emerge into a fairy-tale world. Around the next turn they find no palace, but a small stone house whose unexpected appearance in a province of familiar wooden farmhouses seems almost as marvelous. Diana Barry recognizes it as Echo Lodge, the home of Miss Lavendar Lewis, a place she has heard about but never visited.

The house makes its own impression before its inhabitants appear. It is built from rough red Island sandstone, with low eaves, dormer windows under wooden hoods, and two large chimneys. Ivy covers the stone and has taken on bronze and wine-red autumn colors. Inside, the low-ceilinged room is carefully kept and old-fashioned; its small-paned windows, muslin curtains, and pale-blue china set out for tea make the house feel prepared for a gathering. The table has six places and is decorated with little ferns. To the hungry travelers, it is especially inviting after their walk through the autumn air.

The Host and the Imagined Tea Party

Miss Lavendar Lewis appears unlike the visitors’ expectation of an elderly spinster. She is a small, carefully dressed woman with thick, wavy white hair, a girlish face, soft brown eyes, and dimples. Her cream muslin dress, patterned with pale roses, suits her so naturally that its youthfulness does not seem out of place. The contrast between the girls’ assumptions and the lively, graceful woman before them establishes the surprise at the heart of the visit: Echo Lodge is not a conventional household, and its owner has preserved a playful inner life.

Anne Shirley promptly asks to stay, though she realizes Miss Lavendar Lewis may be expecting other guests. The apparent tea party, however, has no invited company. Miss Lavendar Lewis admits that she has pretended one was coming because she is lonely and loves the right kind of company. She has cooked, decorated the table, set out her mother’s wedding china, and dressed for the occasion. Charlotta the Fourth, her devoted helper, has joined in the private fiction, but has not disclosed it to outsiders.

Diana Barry privately finds the make-believe peculiar for a woman of forty-five. Anne Shirley responds differently: she recognizes in Miss Lavendar Lewis a fellow person who imagines things. That recognition shifts the scene from embarrassment to intimacy. Miss Lavendar Lewis explains that pretending is a compensation for the isolation of living far from other people, and she is glad the secret has been discovered on a day when real visitors have arrived. The imagined tea party can now become an actual one. Her confession does not end her make-believe; instead, the girls’ acceptance lets it open a door to companionship.

Echoes, Stories, and the Past

Miss Lavendar Lewis gives the visitors a demonstration of the house’s surroundings. At her direction, Charlotta the Fourth blows a horn from a stone bench. After a brief stillness, echoes answer from the woods across the river: many faint, silvery repetitions that seem to come from the landscape itself. Charlotta then laughs loudly, and the woods return her laughter. The horn and the answering voices make Echo Lodge more than an unusual dwelling: the name describes an experience in which a small human sound travels outward and comes back transformed.

The visit also brings the first hint of a history Miss Lavendar Lewis has not offered to explain. When Anne Shirley mentions Paul Irving, the little pupil she teaches, Miss Lavendar Lewis’s voice changes subtly. She asks who he is and says she did not know anyone of that name lived in Avonlea. Anne Shirley remembers too late that the name touches Miss Lavendar Lewis’s old romance. She explains that Paul Irving came from Boston the previous year to live with his grandmother, Mrs. Irving. The exchange exposes an emotional connection to the past without revealing its full story; the sudden shift in Miss Lavendar Lewis’s manner is enough to make Anne Shirley aware that she has touched a sensitive subject.

Before the girls leave, Miss Lavendar Lewis gives each a bunch of lavender. She tells them that her mother loved its scent and planted the borders; her father named his daughter Lavendar because the fragrance recalled the night he first met her mother. The family story makes the flowers at Echo Lodge both part of the garden and a keepsake of her parents’ affection. It also gives the girls another glimpse of the past held within the house, alongside the wedding china on the tea table and the romance suggested by Paul Irving’s name.

A Friendship Takes Root

At the gate beneath the firs, Anne Shirley promises that the girls will return, and she invokes Paul Irving’s habit of saying that he must tear himself away from Green Gables. As the visitors look back from the bend in the lane, Miss Lavendar Lewis is sitting alone on an old stone bench beneath a silver poplar, her head resting wearily on her hand. The brightness has gone from her face, though her departing smile retains its sweetness. Diana Barry sees plainly how lonely she is and resolves that they must visit often. Anne Shirley, meanwhile, reflects on how fitting the name Lavendar is for someone associated with sweetness and old-fashioned grace.

The promise becomes action. After that October day, Anne Shirley and Diana Barry visit Echo Lodge many times. They sometimes drive around by road, sometimes walk through the woods, and when Diana Barry cannot come, Anne Shirley goes alone. A friendship develops between Miss Lavendar Lewis, who has kept youth alive in her heart, and Anne Shirley, whose imagination and intuition help make up for her lack of experience. For Miss Lavendar Lewis, the girls bring the energy of a wider, more active world into a life that has long been secluded; for Anne Shirley, the hostess becomes a genuine kindred spirit.

Charlotta the Fourth welcomes the returning visitors with her very broad smiles, loving them for their own sakes and for the sake of her adored mistress. Their visits bring new high spirits to the little stone house. The first encounter thus has consequences beyond its afternoon tea: the isolation revealed by the empty places at the table is answered by a friendship that repeatedly brings company to Echo Lodge. The wrong turn gives the story its outward shape, but the deeper turn is from an imagined gathering to a real, enduring circle of affection.