marks an epoch in my life. But the best of it all was the coming home.
CHAPTER XXX. The Queen s Class Is Organized
MARILLA laid her knitting on her lap and leaned back in her chair. Her
eyes were tired, and she thought vaguely that she must see about having
her glasses changed the next time she went to town, for her eyes had
grown tired very often of late.
It was nearly dark, for the full November twilight had fallen around
Green Gables, and the only light in the kitchen came from the dancing
red flames in the stove.
Anne was curled up Turk-fashion on the hearthrug, gazing into that
joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled
from the maple cordwood. She had been reading, but her book had slipped
to the floor, and now she was dreaming, with a smile on her parted lips.
Glittering castles in Spain were shaping themselves out of the mists and
rainbows of her lively fancy; adventures wonderful and enthralling
were happening to her in cloudland--adventures that always turned out
triumphantly and never involved her in scrapes like those of actual
life.
Marilla looked at her with a tenderness that would never have been
suffered to reveal itself in any clearer light than that soft mingling
of fireshine and shadow. The lesson of a love that should display itself
easily in spoken word and open look was one Marilla could never learn.
But she had learned to love this slim, gray-eyed girl with an affection
all the deeper and stronger from its very undemonstrativeness. Her love
made her afraid of being unduly indulgent, indeed. She had an uneasy
feeling that it was rather sinful to set one s heart so intensely on any
human creature as she had set hers on Anne, and perhaps she performed a
sort of unconscious penance for this by being stricter and more critical
than if the girl had been less dear to her. Certainly Anne herself had
no idea how Marilla loved her. She sometimes thought wistfully that
Marilla was very hard to please and distinctly lacking in sympathy
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