“Then let us be friends again. I would rather have you for a friend than any other woman for a wife. I simply will not give you up.”
So the pendulum went on swinging evenly between the two points, when Cinderella entered both lives. 121
And now it was Sunday morning and the chimes were pealing—“Oh, come all ye faithful.” Marilla listened with a throb of joy, though she did not know the words they were saying in sweetest melody. Miss Armitage came and stood by the cot with a cordial good morning.
Marilla stretched out her hand and glanced up with an entreating sort of smile.
“Was I very bad last night?” she asked in a wistful tone.
“Bad? Why—what was it?”
“I’ve been thinking it over. Oh, I didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Borden. It is so lovely and quiet and beautiful here. But it is right. I am her bound-out girl, and I was glad to go there. You wouldn’t like me to be always looking for what was nice and pleasant and shirking other things, would you?”
“Dear.” She stooped and kissed her. She had been going over some arguments fitted for a child’s understanding, and she was afraid of a rather painful time. And the worst to her was the fact that she had come to love the child and really desired her.
“The babies, you know, are so fond of me, 122 and they are all very good. So I wouldn’t have any reason for not staying with them. And it will be only five years more, then I shall be eighteen. And I thought—” flushing daintily, “that maybe Jane might marry, and you would want some one in her place and if it was—me,” rather tremulously—“I could come—I love you so. I’d be your Cinderella always. And when I go back it will be like the King’s ball—I shall keep thinking how lovely it was for you to bring me here instead of sending me to a hospital, and it will comfort me just as the music did.”
Miss Armitage bent over and kissed her but there were tears in her eyes. She was touched with the child’s reasoning that was so like heroism.