“I—yes, I had written Sylvia, or no—not exactly that,” David stammered, taken unawares, and turning red. “I—it was just an idea of mine, it came into my head suddenly,” he added, with a most unwonted confusion in his manner, as he remembered that old bright dream of a porch on the seaward side of the Keyport farmhouse, and himself and poor little unwanted, illegitimate Gay breakfasting there. “I wrote Sylvia about setting her free of a sort of understanding between us,” David went on, with a baffled feeling that his words were not saying what he wanted them to say. “As a matter of fact, a letter from her, saying the same thing, crossed mine,” he finished, again feeling that this statement was utterly flat and meaningless and not in the least relevant to the talk.
“You didn’t say you—cared,” Gabrielle said, very low. “You simply put it to me as a sort of—solution.”
“I see now that it was an affront to you, Gay,” David answered, sorely. “I have regretted it a thousand times! I wanted to offer you—what I had. But God knows,” he added, bitterly, “I have nothing to offer!”
“So that you—would not—do it again?” Gabrielle said, hardly above a breath, and breathing quickly, yet with an effort to appear careless.
“I would never offer any woman less than—love, again,” David answered. “If I had not been a bungling fool in such matters, you should never have been distressed by it!”
“You see, you did not care for me, David,” the girl reminded him, in a low, strained voice, and not meeting his eyes, when they were at the gloomy side door. The mist was thickening with twilight, and a fitful, warm wind was stirring its fold visibly.
“I had been thinking about it for days,” he said, “it had—I don’t know how to express it!—it had taken possession of me.”
Gabrielle, her shoulder turned toward him, flung up her head with a proud little motion.
“Tom—loves me,” she said, steadily. Yet David saw the hand that held the flowers shake and the beautiful mouth tremble.
“Tom,” his half-brother said, still unable to shake off the wretched feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes, “would make you a devoted and generous husband, Gabrielle.”