“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.”

VIII

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.