"Marilla."
Marilla Cuthbert, down on her hands and knees and scrubbing the kitchen floor vigourously, paused. Only for a second - but it was a pause.
"Marilla," the deep voice said again. "Aren't you going to welcome me back, Rilla-girl?"
Marilla stiffened. Who did he think he was, calling her by his old childhood name for her... nearly forty years later! She put the brush down, a little too carefully, and rose to her feet. "It's a long time since I was a girl, John Blythe, and I'd thank you to remember it!"
The smile she had loved as a girl - still loved, if only she could admit it - broke over his face. "Ah, you're still a girl to me. I look at you and I remember the dark little spitfire who kicked me for tripping her brother up when she was barely seven and I nearly nine. It took a while for my pride to recover, I tell you!"
Marilla felt a reluctant smile cross her own face. It did sound funny when it was put that way. "There'd be few who'd remember it now. And don't you go reminding them!" she added hastily, severely, as a still-boyish twinkle glimmered in the depths of her visitor's hazel eyes.
The twinkle faded and John Blythe came to take her work-hardened hands in his. "Marilla, have you given any more thought to what I asked of you in the spring? You said you needed time..."
She turned her face away. "I - I can't."
"I see."
His voice was cold and she flinched, remembering that same coldness from far too many years ago. Years that had spent dutifully, righteously ... but pitifully, painfully lonesome. She could not watch him walk away a second time. "John - don't. I want to, really I do, but - "
"But - what? There's always a but with you, Marilla Cuthbert. You've looked after everyone else - mother, father, brother .... when is it going to be time for you?"
"Have you heard about Anne?" she gasped out, for once hoping that Rachel Lynde had taken her ample self over to the Blythe place as soon as the latter had returned from their summer away. Rachel always enjoyed being first with the gossip.
He managed to grin. "The boy that wasn't? I've heard. Gil is wild with curiosity to meet her."
"We've decided to keep her, Matthew and I," Marilla told him baldly. "You have to know that, first..."
"You're raising her then?" She had to give him credit - unlike the rest of Avonlea, he managed to avoid sounding either amused or incredulous at the thought of her - her! - raising a child.
Mutely, she nodded. She could not explain in words what the redheaded girl-child was coming to mean to her.
"And you think it makes a difference to me?" Now he did sound amused. "Marilla, she's a girl. I know nothin' about girls. She's all yours. You needn't worry any about Gil either - he's already said that if we hook up, you and I, he'd rather stay at our current place. He's nearly fourteen after all. Old enough to be home alone and there's neighbours right and left."
"Well now," Marilla said, "well now, that's a shame. Matthew's been hoping that Gilbert wouldn't mind putting in a few hours at Green Gables, now and then..."
John Blythe smiled - smiled so broadly that composed, self-possessed Marilla Cuthbert turned a deeper shade of pink than she had for many a long year. "So it's a yes? You'll marry me?"
"If that's what you want," she said stiffly, hating how her knees felt suddenly wobbly. She was too old to feel like this...
He whooped like his own son and swung her in a dizzying circle ... swung her so fast that she squeaked in protest and shut her eyes against the sickening blur that was whizzing past. Then he was kissing her, and she was lost ... as she had wanted to be lost, thirty years ago when she was barely twenty five and still not much more than a girl...
The sound of the front door (thank Heaven it wasn't the kitchen door!) slammed open and shut. Violently. Light footsteps on the stairs. Marilla jerked away, knowing that an unbecoming blush was sweeping up her face once again.
"T-that's Anne, in from s-school," she stammered, feeling as witless as the eleven year old in the east gable room. "I must see what new drama's come up now."
"Er - I think I might be able to explain that," put in a young male voice sheepishly from the kitchen door. He was rubbing his scalp in a thoughtful way.
Marilla groaned. John's eyes twinkled again in that exasperating manner.
Gilbert - for it was indeed John's son Gilbert - did his best to look ingratiating. "Well, see, it was really my fault. I wanted her to look at me and I called her 'Carrots'...."