“My dear girl,” David said, slowly, heavily, “you’re sure you wouldn’t be happy? You would be very rich, Gabrielle, and you could teach him to make the most of his money. I think it would make Aunt Flora and Sylvia very happy.”
Gabrielle was moving slowly ahead of him toward the house now. She half turned to look at him over her shoulder.
“David, do you think I should say yes?” she whispered.
“I think perhaps you should consider it gravely, Gay. You say you like him, and what other woman is he ever apt to find that would understand him, or even like him, so well? Imagine what harm his money is going to do to him, once he is better, mixing in the world again!? All sorts of social thieves will be upon him——”
“That’s what I think of!” she responded, eagerly, so childishly, so earnestly concerned that David felt his heart wrung afresh with a longing to put his arms about her, comfort her, kneel at her feet and put his lips to her beautiful young hands. “If—if only we can get out of here!” she whispered, with another strangely fearful glance at the old house, “his affairs straightened out, Sylvia and Aunt Flora and I—going somewhere!—anywhere! David, we mustn’t spend another winter here. And yet now, now,” she began again, with fresh agitation, “I don’t know what Tom thinks! He may think—indeed, I know he does think, that everything will be as he wishes! What could I do? I couldn’t help—and indeed, I didn’t say anything untrue! I only told him he must not think of such things until he was much, much better, but he seems to have taken that as a sort of—as a sort of—consent—in a way——”
“Shall I talk to him, dear? Tell him that you need more time?”
“Oh, no, please, David! Leave it to me!”
“Sometimes, I’ve been given to understand,” he said, with his quiet smile, “that a girl feels this way when she really is sure, or when, at all events, it develops that the doubt and hesitation were all natural enough, and part of—of really caring. Take time about it, Gabrielle. Money and position do count for something, after all, and he is a Fleming, and he knew your mother. It isn’t,” added David, with a little conscious change in his own tone, “it isn’t the other man of whom you spoke to me last June?”
For a moment Gay did not answer. Then she said, in a peculiar voice:
“I’ve often wondered what you meant by that conversation, David. Whether you remembered it? What was it? Had you consulted Aunt Flora and Sylvia as to my destiny—as to the problem of what was to become of me?”