When he saw how her eyes danced and how impulsively she clasped her fingers together at the mere notion, David was able to form some idea of the strain she had been under.
“Oh, David—to see the streets and—and people, again! To feel that I needn’t face Tom——”
“Meanwhile,” David proceeded with his plan, “I’ll get Tom to go off with me somewhere, just for a few weeks. Norfolk, maybe, or Palm Beach—it may clear up his mind, too. And perhaps I can explain to him that while you do like him, you don’t feel quite ready to be any man’s wife. I can tell him that the thought of it upsets you——”
“Ah, David, what an angel you are! But then what about Sylvia and Aunt Flora?”
“Well, they can follow you in to Boston. Sylvia spoke to me about either doing library work or teaching in some girls’ school; they can be looking about for an apartment. But the main point is,” ended David, “that you get out of it at once, before you make yourself sick.”
“It seems so cowardly,” said Gabrielle, fairly trembling in her eagerness and satisfaction.
“No, it’s not cowardly. I suppose it’s what all girls feel,” David said, in a somewhat questioning voice, “before they get married——?”
“That’s just it,” Gay confessed, her cheeks suddenly scarlet. “I don’t know what most girls feel, and I haven’t any mother——”
She paused. But David, looking at her over his cigarette, merely flushed a little in his turn, and did not speak.
“But I know this,” Gabrielle went on, feeling for words, and ranging knives and forks and spoons in orderly rows, very busily, as she spoke, “I know that what makes me feel so—so doubtful, about marrying Tom, isn’t—isn’t being afraid, David,” she struggled on, her eyes pleading, and her cheeks childishly red. “It’s—not—being afraid!”