Chapter XXX

CHAPTER XXX

The Queens 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 and understanding.
But she always checked the thought reproachfully, remembering what
she owed to Marilla.

"Anne," said Marilla abruptly, "Miss Stacy was here this
afternoon when you were out with Diana."

Anne came back from her other world with a start and a sigh.

"Was she? Oh, I'm so sorry I wasn't in. Why didn't you call me,
Marilla? Diana and I were only over in the Haunted Wood. It's
lovely in the woods now. All the little wood things--the ferns
and the satin leaves and the crackerberries--have gone to sleep,
just as if somebody had tucked them away until spring under a
blanket of leaves. I think it was a little gray fairy with a
rainbow scarf that came tiptoeing along the last moonlight night
and did it. Diana wouldn't say much about