Diana’s wedding marks both a marriage and a change in the lifelong friendship between Diana Barry and Anne Shirley. At Orchard Slope, Anne helps prepare Diana for the ceremony and stands beside her as bridesmaid, fulfilling a role imagined since they were twelve. The day brings their childhood expectations into the present: Diana leaves for a new home with Fred Wright, while Anne discovers that a changed friendship can still endure and that her old comradeship with Gilbert Blythe can return.

Background and the Meaning of the Day

Five days before the wedding, the preparations at the gray house at Orchard Slope fill the household with baking, brewing, boiling, and stewing for a large, old-fashioned celebration. Anne enjoys the bustle, but beneath it is the knowledge that Diana’s marriage will alter their daily life. Diana’s new home will be two miles from Green Gables. The distance is not great, yet the constant companionship they have shared cannot continue in quite the same way.

Anne’s sadness makes the wedding part of a broader passage out of girlhood. She remembers how, when they were twelve, she had imagined Diana’s inevitable marriage and their resulting separation. Now that the event has arrived, she recognizes the difference between a childhood picture and a real change in the lives of the people in it. She fears the transformations that come with growing up, even as she takes part in the preparations that make this particular change joyful.

Preparations and Farewell

On the wedding day, Anne ties white ribbon around Diana’s bouquet in the westward-looking gable. She singles out the pink roses as flowers of love and faith, making the bouquet a small expression of the affection and loyalty at the center of the occasion. Diana stands in bridal white, her black curls beneath the veil Anne places for her, honoring the sentimental agreement they made years before.

The scene partly fulfills Anne’s old imagined ceremony, but not exactly as she once pictured it. She is Diana’s bridesmaid, though her sleeves are not the puffed ones she had anticipated, and she is not wholly heartbroken. Nor does she hate Fred. The difference matters: the childhood fantasy had made marriage and parting seem like a single loss, whereas the grown Anne can love her friend and accept her friend’s happiness without treating the marriage as a complete severing of their bond.

Anne is also due to be bridesmaid at Philippa Gordon’s wedding the following June. She jokes that she must then stop, invoking the superstition that three times a bridesmaid means never a bride. The remark places her own possible future beside Diana’s immediate one, but leaves that future unsettled; the scene does not turn Anne’s part in the wedding into a promise about whom she will marry.

Ceremony and Celebration

Diana’s nervousness briefly threatens to overwhelm her when she turns pale and trembles, convinced she cannot go through with the ceremony and may faint. Anne answers with comic firmness, telling her to take courage and pointing out that many people survive getting married. Her teasing is a form of reassurance grounded in their intimacy: she does not treat Diana’s fear solemnly, but tries to interrupt it with humor.

Anne goes downstairs on Gilbert’s arm. They meet at the top of the stairs for the first time since leaving Kingsport; Gilbert has arrived that day to serve as best man. Anne notices that he looks well but rather thin, and that a flush comes to his cheek as she approaches in her soft white dress, lilies of the valley shining in her hair. Their entrance together draws a murmur of admiration from the crowded parlor. The scene gives their reunion a public setting, but its importance lies less in the onlookers’ notice than in the ease that will return between them over the course of the evening.

Fred enters alone, red-faced, and Diana follows on her father’s arm. She does not faint, and nothing interrupts the ceremony. Feasting and merry-making follow. As evening wanes, Fred and Diana drive through the moonlight to their new home, while Gilbert walks Anne to Green Gables. The departure makes the change tangible: Diana’s married life begins elsewhere, even though her new home remains nearby.

Aftermath and Significance

During the informal merriment, something of Anne and Gilbert’s old comradeship returns. Walking together on the familiar road feels good to Anne. The wedding therefore changes one close relationship while renewing another: Diana’s constant presence in Anne’s everyday life is about to diminish, but Anne and Gilbert recover a natural ease after their time apart. The night’s moonlight over familiar fields frames this return not as a reversal of time but as a new moment within a landscape they already share.

The wedding holds departure and continuity together. Anne’s childhood promise to be Diana’s bridesmaid is kept, and Diana’s marriage fulfills the future Anne once imagined, but their friendship is not erased by the change. Diana insists that they will continue to love each other, and Anne acknowledges the faithfulness of their friendship while admitting that marriage will bring Diana other interests. The scene allows both truths to stand: their lives will not be quite the same, and what they have built together remains real.

The celebration also places Anne among the ordinary thresholds of adult life without resolving her own. Her joking reference to the bridesmaid superstition and her tenderness toward Diana keep attention on what the wedding means to her now: a beloved friend’s new beginning, a childhood pattern reaching its end, and the possibility of closeness changing form rather than disappearing. The evening closes with Diana and Fred departing together and Anne returning to Green Gables beside Gilbert, carrying both the ache of alteration and the comfort of renewed companionship.