“Oh!” Anne clasped her hands, all athrill
with excitement. “And of course you will,
Marilla, won’t you?”
“I haven’t made up my mind,” said
Marilla rather tartly. “I don’t rush
into things in your headlong way, Anne. Third
cousinship is a pretty slim claim. And it will
be a fearful responsibility to have two children of
six years to look after . . . twins, at that.”
Marilla had an idea that twins were just twice as
bad as single children.
“Twins are very interesting . . . at least one
pair of them,” said Anne. “It’s
only when there are two or three pairs that it gets
monotonous. And I think it would be real nice
for you to have something to amuse you when I’m
away in school.”
“I don’t reckon there’d be much
amusement in it . . . more worry and bother than anything
else, I should say. It wouldn’t be so risky
if they were even as old as you were when I took you.
I wouldn’t mind Dora so much . . . she seems
good and quiet. But that Davy is a limb.”
Anne was fond of children and her heart yearned over
the Keith twins. The remembrance of her own neglected
childhood was very vivid with her still. She
knew that Marilla’s only vulnerable point was
her stern devotion to what she believed to be her
duty, and Anne skillfully marshalled her arguments
along this line.
“If Davy is naughty it’s all the more
reason why he should have good training, isn’t
it, Marilla? If we don’t take them we don’t
know who will, nor what kind of influences may surround
them. Suppose Mrs. Keith’s next door neighbors,
the Sprotts, were to take them. Mrs. Lynde says
Henry Sprott is the most profane man that ever lived
and you can’t believe a word his children say.
Wouldn’t it be dreadful to have the twins learn
anything like that? Or suppose they went to the
Wiggins’. Mrs. Lynde says that Mr. Wiggins
sells everything off the place that can be sold and
brings his family up on skim milk. You wouldn’t
like your relations to be starved, even if they were
only third cousins, would you? It seems to me,
Marilla, that it is our duty to take them.”
“I suppose it is,” assented Marilla gloomily.
“I daresay I’ll tell Mary I’ll take
them. You needn’t look so delighted, Anne.
It will mean a good deal of extra work for you.
I can’t sew a stitch on account of my eyes,
so you’ll have to see to the making and mending
of their clothes. And you don’t like sewing.”
“I hate it,” said Anne calmly, “but
if you are willing to take those children from a sense
of duty surely I can do their sewing from a sense
of duty. It does people good to have to do things
they don’t like . . . in moderation.”
Marilla Adopts Twins
Mrs. Rachel Lynde was sitting at her kitchen window,
knitting a quilt, just as she had been sitting one
evening several years previously when Matthew Cuthbert
had driven down over the hill with what Mrs. Rachel
called “his imported orphan.” But
that had been in springtime; and this was late autumn,
and all the woods were leafless and the fields sere
and brown. The sun was just setting with a great
deal of purple and golden pomp behind the dark woods
west of Avonlea when a buggy drawn by a comfortable
brown nag came down the hill. Mrs. Rachel peered
at it eagerly.
