The girl had been watching Matthew ever since he had passed her and she had her eyes on him now. Matthew was not looking at her and would not have seen what she was really like even if he had been, but an ordinary observer would have seen this: A child of about eleven, dressed in a very short, very tight, and ugly dress of yellowish-gray. She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, red hair. Her small, white face was covered in freckles, and her eyes, were large and looked green in some light and gray in others.
Thankfully, Matthew was spared the ordeal of speaking first, for as soon as the girl concluded that he was coming to her, she stood up, grasping with one thin brown hand the handle of a shabby old bag, and the other she held out to greet him.
"I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?" she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice. "I'm very glad to see you. I was beginning to be afraid you weren't coming for me and I was imagining all the things that might have happened to prevent you. I had made up my mind that if you didn't come for me tonight I'd go down the track to that big wild cherry tree and climb up and stay all night. I wouldn't be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don't you think? I was quite sure you would come for me in the morning, if you didn't tonight." Matthew had taken the scrawny little hand awkwardly in his and at that moment he decided what to do. He simply could not tell this child with the glowing eyes that there had been a mistake, he would take her home and let Marilla do that. She couldn't be left at Bright River by herself anyway, no matter what mistake had been made, so all questions and explanations might as well be deferred until he was safely back at Green Gables. "I'm sorry I was late," Matthew said shyly. "Come along. The horse is over in the yard. Give me your bag." "Oh, I can carry it," the child responded cheerfully. "It isn't heavy. I've got all my worldly goods in it, but it isn't heavy. And if it isn't carried in just a certain way the handle pulls out, so I'd better keep it because I know the trick of how to do it just right. Oh, I'm very glad you've come, even if it would have been nice to sleep in a wild cherry-tree. We've got to drive a long way, haven't we? Mrs. Spencer said it was eight miles. I'm glad because I love driving. Oh, it seems so wonderful that I'm going to live with you and belong to you. I've never belonged to anybody, not really. But the asylum was the worst. I've only been in it four months, but that was enough, let me tell you. I don't suppose you were ever an orphan in an asylum, so you can't possibly understand what it is like. It's worse than anything you could imagine. Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn't mean to be wicked. It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it? They were good, you know--the asylum people. But there is so little scope for the imagination in an asylum, only just in the other orphans. It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them, to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a prince, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess. I used to lie awake at nights and imagine things like that, because I didn't have time in the day. I guess that's why I'm so thin--I AM dreadfully thin, aren't I? There isn't a thing on my bones, although I do love to imagine I'm nice and plump with dimples in my elbows."
