After the funeral a doctor told Marilla that she must not read, or sew, or cry, or she would lose her sight altogether. She had no money left. She decided, in her plain way, that Green Gables would have to be sold.
I decided otherwise. I would give up the Avery and not go to Redmond. I would find a school near home, and stay. Marilla argued with me for about a day, which for Marilla was a surrender.
The Avonlea school had already been promised to Gilbert Blythe. He heard what I meant to do and withdrew, and took the school at White Sands instead, where he would have to pay for his board, so that I could teach at home and live at Green Gables. We had not been friends since I was eleven. One evening, on the road home, we met, and I thanked him, and that was the end of five years of nonsense.
I taught in Avonlea for two years. In the first autumn, Marilla took in twins — Davy and Dora Keith, the children of a distant cousin who had died. Dora was good from the day she arrived. Davy was not good and saw no reason to start. The house, which had been so quiet after Matthew, filled back up with noise, and I discovered that Marilla, who had once asked for a boy and got me, was not at all displeased to have a boy at last.
I did not think of it as a sacrifice then, and I do not now. The road went round a bend. There was more on the other side than I had expected.
