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 th