She and Sylvia had been spending the afternoon upstairs in Tom’s “study,” as his mansard sitting room was called. The old piano upon which all these young men and women had practised, years ago, as children, had been moved up there now; there was a card table, magazines, books. The electric installation would be begun downstairs in a few weeks, and the whole place wore an unusually dismantled and desolate air; the girls were glad to take their sewing up to the cool and quiet of Tom’s study. Flora had been wretched with malaria of late, and spent whole days in bed, lying without a book or even her knitting, staring darkly and silently into space.
This afternoon Gabrielle had escaped, to scramble for half an hour along the shore, her busy eyes upon the twinkling low-tide life among the rocks, her thoughts a jumble of strange apprehensions and fears. Now she was lingering in the garden, reluctant to surrender herself once more to all the shadows and unnamed menaces of the house, picking a few of the brave bronze zinnias and the velvet wallflowers; the floating pale disks of cosmos, on their feathery leafage, were almost as high as her tawny head.
She started as David’s figure loomed suddenly through the soft veils of the autumn fog, close beside her, and laid her hand with a quite simple gesture of fright against her heart. The colour, brought by her scrambling walk into her cheeks, ebbed slowly from beneath the warm cream of her skin. Her eyes looked large and childish in their delicate umber shadows. David saw the fine, frail linen over her beautiful young breast rise and fall with the quickened beat of her heart; the soft moist weather had curled her tawny hair into little damp feathers of gold, against her temples.
An ache of sheer pain, the pain of the artist for beauty beyond sensing, shook him. She was youth, sweetness, loveliness incarnate, here against a curtain of flowers and gray mist, with wallflowers in her hand, and the toneless pink and white stars of the cosmos floating all about her head. David gave her his hand, and she clung to it as if she would never let it go, as if she were a frightened child, found at last.
“David—thank God you’re home!” she said. “But you’ve tired yourself,” she added, instantly concerned. “You look thinner, and you look pale.”
“I’m fine,” he said, with his good smile. “But why did you want me back?” he asked, a little anxiously, in reference to her emotion at seeing him.
“Oh, I don’t know. Things”—she said, vaguely, with a glance toward the looming black shape of Wastewater, netted in its blackened vines—“things have—made me nervous. I’m not sleeping well.”
“Aunt Flora looks like a ghost, too,” the man said, and Gay gave a nervous little protesting laugh.
“Don’t talk about ghosts! But it’s only her old malaria, David,” she added, frowning faintly.
“I don’t know. Her colour looks ghastly. And Sylvia seems twitchy, too. What’s the matter with us all?”