Their eyes met across the sorry little board, and for a moment the strange look held and neither spoke.
“I have been playing a part with Tom,” Gabrielle said, after a pause, “and I could go on playing it. I could marry him to-morrow, and—and still like him, and be kind to him! But, David,” she said, in a whisper, “is that enough?”
“I don’t know, dear,” David said, with a dry mouth. “You mean, that it could be different,” he added, presently, “that it would be different, if it were that other man—of whom you spoke to me one day?”
The girl only nodded in answer, her eyes fixed with a sort of fear and shame and courage upon his. If it were the other man! she thought—if it were David! And at the mere flying dream of what marriage to David would mean—going out into life with David—Gabrielle felt her heart swell until something like an actual pain suffocated her and her senses swam together.
He sat there, unconscious, kindly, everything that was good and clever, handsome and infinitely dear, and she dared not even stretch out her hand to lay it upon his. His black hair was blown into loose waves, his old rough coat hung open, his fine dark eyes and firm mouth expressed only sympathy and concern. She dared not think what love might do to them.
“I want—to be afraid when I am married,” she said. “I want to feel that I am putting my life into somebody’s keeping, going into a strange country—not just assuming new responsibilities—in the old!”
“I think I understand,” David said. And feeling that further talk of this sort was utterly unsafe for him and likely to prove only more unsettling to her, he proposed that they walk to the Whittakers’, a few blocks away, and see how the large and cheerful family was weathering the storm.
The Whittakers, mother, two unmarried daughters, two young sons, married daughter with husband and baby, were having a family tea that looked enchanting to Gabrielle and David, coming in out of the wind.
The big room was deliciously warm, and Mrs. Whittaker put Gay, who was a little shy, beside her and talked to her so charmingly that the girl’s heart expanded like a flower in sunshine. Mrs. Whittaker had known Gay’s poor little mother and both of Roger Fleming’s wives; she said that by a curious coincidence she had had a letter that very day from Mary Rosecrans.
“But you don’t remember her, of course,” she said. “She was a lovely nurse—a Crowchester girl, but married now and living in Australia. Let me see—nineteen—Dicky’s eighteen—she must have married when you were only a baby. But I had her when my Dicky here was born, and poor little Mrs. Roger Fleming had her for months and months at Wastewater. Now, Mr. Fleming, you’re going to let me keep this child overnight? The girls will take good care of her.”