“I can see that you don’t mean that,” David said, hurt and confused. Gabrielle caring——! Gabrielle keeping this away from them all——! He could not adjust himself to the thought of it easily, nor change all his ideas to meet it. “Some day will you tell me?” he said, a little uncertainly and clumsily, looking out upon what seemed suddenly a brazen glare of sea and sky.
“Some day!” she answered, quietly. And there was a silence.
It was broken by a calling voice from above them, first like the pipe of a gull, then resolving itself into a summons from Sarah. Gabrielle and David got to their feet with disturbed glances; it was perhaps only a caller, but Sarah sounded, as Gay said, scrambling briskly up the cliff at his side, “important.”
Sarah looked important, too, and her face had the deep flush on one side and the shiny paleness on the other that indicated an interrupted nap. If they pleased, it was a man for Mr. Fleming.
“From Boston?” David said, as they accompanied the maid through the garden.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“It may be the electric-light man,” Gabrielle suggested, yet with an odd impending sense of something grave. Sarah quite obviously felt this, too, for she added curiously, flutteringly: “He’s a queer, rough sort of feller.”
“Where did you put him, Sarah?”
“He didn’t go in, Miss Gabrielle. He says he’d walk up and down outside. There he is.”