put off. He wants to know if we can keep them till the fall and he’ll try and take them then. We will, of course, won’t we Marilla?”
“I don’t see that there is anything else for us to do,” said Marilla rather grimly, although she felt a secret relief. “Anyhow they’re not so much trouble as they were . . . or else we’ve got used to them. Davy has improved a great deal.”
“His manners are certainly much better,” said Anne cautiously, as if she were not prepared to say as much for his morals.
Anne had come home from school the previous evening, to find Marilla away at an Aid meeting, Dora asleep on the kitchen sofa, and Davy in the sitting room closet, blissfully absorbing the contents of a jar of Marilla’s famous yellow plum preserves . . . “company jam,” Davy called it . . . which he had been forbidden to touch. He looked very guilty when Anne pounced on him and whisked him out of the closet.
“Davy Keith, don’t you know that it is very wrong of you to be eating that jam, when you were told never to meddle with anything in that closet?”
“Yes, I knew it was wrong,” admitted Davy uncomfortably, “but plum jam is awful nice, Anne. I just peeped in and it looked so good I thought I’d take just a weeny taste. I stuck my finger in . . .” Anne groaned . . . “and licked it clean. And it was so much gooder than I’d ever thought that I got a spoon and just sailed in.”
Anne gave him such a serious lecture on the sin of
