The wedding of Stephen Irving and Lavendar Lewis is both a private ceremony among close companions and the culmination of a long-delayed romance. Held in the garden at Echo Lodge, at the very place where Stephen proposed twenty-five years earlier, it joins the couple in a setting bound to their shared past. Its leave-taking is marked not only by the guests’ farewells but by the return of the house’s beloved echoes, which seem to accompany Lavendar from an old life of dreams into a fuller life with Stephen.

Background and preparations

The wedding follows a month of activity in Avonlea. Anne Shirley’s preparations for her own departure to Redmond College take second place to the arrangements at Echo Lodge, where consultations and plans fill the stone house. Anne and Diana Barry spend much of their time there, sharing in the preparations; even the choice of Lavendar’s traveling dress and the making of her gray silk gown occupy Anne’s thoughts. The wedding brings the happiness of the couple’s story into the everyday business of sewing, planning, and readying a home for a change of life.

The date is set for the last Wednesday in August. Lavendar and Stephen are to be married beneath the honeysuckle trellis in the garden, precisely where Stephen proposed twenty-five years before. The ceremony will be deliberately small: Mrs. Irving, Paul Irving, Gilbert Blythe, Anne, Diana, and Lavendar’s cousins are expected, with no larger company planned. Afterward, the couple intend to leave on the six o’clock train for a trip to the Pacific coast. When they return in the fall, Paul and Charlotta the Fourth are to go with them to Boston.

The future of Echo Lodge is part of the wedding arrangements too. Though the house will be closed for the winter, it is not to be sold or permanently abandoned. The hens and cow will be sold, and the windows boarded up, but Stephen and Lavendar intend to return each summer and live there again. For Anne, that plan changes the meaning of the coming absence: the house will wait for their return rather than pass into other hands or stand as a permanently deserted home.

The ceremony at Echo Lodge

The day threatens rain, and Charlotta the Fourth worries that a downpour will spoil the garden ceremony and bring mud into the house. It does not rain. By noon the rooms are decorated and the table laid, while Lavendar waits upstairs in her wedding clothes. The guests arrive by one o’clock. With the minister from Grafton away on vacation, Mr. Allan performs the ceremony. The wedding has no elaborate formalities: Lavendar comes down the stairs to meet Stephen at the foot, and they go together to the honeysuckle arbor, where the guests gather informally around them.

Anne and Diana stand beside the old stone bench, with Charlotta the Fourth between them, clasping their hands in her nervous excitement. Mr. Allan opens his blue book and proceeds with the service. At the moment Stephen and Lavendar are pronounced man and wife, the sun breaks through the gray sky and shines on the bride; shifting light and shadow fill the garden. Anne takes the sudden brightness as a lovely omen. The scene’s significance rests in its exact conjunction of place, memory, and present joy: the trellis that recalls the proposal becomes the setting for the marriage itself.

After the ceremony, Anne, Diana, and Charlotta leave the other guests laughing with the newly married couple and go inside to make sure everything is ready for the feast. Charlotta is relieved that the couple are married safely, whatever may happen next, and notes that the rice, old shoes, and cream for whipping are all in place. Her practical attention to wedding customs gives the day a homely counterpoint to the garden’s symbolic moment.

Departure and the house’s farewell

At half past two, Mr. and Mrs. Irving leave Echo Lodge, and the company goes to Bright River to see them off on the afternoon train. As Lavendar steps out of her old home, the farewell becomes a playful communal send-off: Gilbert, Anne, and Diana throw rice, while Charlotta hurls an old shoe and hits Mr. Allan. Paul adds a different kind of celebration by ringing the large brass dinner bell that had stood on the dining-room mantel. His intention is simply to make a joyful noise, but the sound carries across the river. From the points, bends, and hills comes the chime of the fairy wedding bells, growing fainter as the newlyweds depart.

The echoes give the departure a particular resonance because they belong so closely to Lavendar’s attachment to Echo Lodge. Their distant answering sound seems to greet and farewell her at once. The narration frames her leaving not as the end of her imaginative life but as a passage from the old life of dreams and make-believe toward fuller realities in the wider world. Marriage therefore changes the couple’s circumstances without erasing the place and memories that shaped Lavendar’s life; the planned summer returns keep Echo Lodge present in their future.

Two hours later, Anne and Charlotta return to put things in order and lock up the stone house. The garden remains in late sunshine, but the house already feels desolate in the aftermath of the celebration. Charlotta, who has been crying on the way back from the station, finds that a wedding can feel little cheerier than a funeral once it is over. Her response registers the cost of the departure alongside its happiness: the guests have witnessed a joyful beginning, yet the familiar home is now quiet and closed for the season.

Narrative significance

The wedding resolves the long interval between Stephen’s proposal and the couple’s marriage by returning them to the proposal’s original setting. Its intimacy, with a small circle of family and friends rather than a public spectacle, makes the garden and the house central participants in the occasion. The sun’s appearance at the vows, followed by the echoes answering Paul’s bell, gives the scene a pattern of welcome and farewell without displacing its concrete domestic details: the prepared meal, the journey to Bright River, and the work of locking up afterward.

The ending holds celebration and loss in the same frame. Stephen and Lavendar depart together for a new life, and their plan to return each summer preserves Echo Lodge as a continuing home rather than a relic of their past. Yet for Anne and Charlotta, the immediate result is an empty house after a crowded, happy day. The wedding’s emotional force comes from that double movement: a reunion and beginning for the couple, a temporary leave-taking from the stone house, and the promise that its garden and echoes will live again with their return.