“I feel like Bill the Lizard!” Gabrielle thought, finding the idea very funny, and immediately beginning to cry. And she opened eyes brimming with tears and looked into David’s anxious face, close above her own, against a background of red lights and shadows.
Dizziness overcame her, and she shut her eyes again, but not without a bewildered and weary smile that tore at the man’s heart. And then there followed another period of utter darkness during which she could not quite tell if the roaring and crackling were inside or outside of her head.
Suddenly she remembered. They were in Tom’s study, she and Tom and David, and David had come up to say——
And Gay instantly sat upright and looked at David with wild and frightened eyes. She wore the velvet gown in which she had dined, such endless ages ago, and about her, as she half lay in David’s arms, a heavy blanket had been wrapped. David’s face was grimed and sooty, and in the queer lurid light in the summer-house she could see that it was anxious and pale.
They were in the summer-house; that was it. But why should they be here upon this bitter wild night, and whence came the queer pinkish glow that was lighting the black garden and the bare trees in so unnatural a way? John and Trude were draping great curtains—were they the old library curtains?—against the latticed walls; outside, the closely set evergreen shrubs and the lee of the north wall combined to give the summer-house a sort of protection.
“Gabrielle—dearest——” David said. And she felt a hot tear on her face, and put up her finger to touch it wonderingly. “You’re all right, dear!” he added, tenderly. And then, to someone in the gloomy confusion of old twisted benches and rickety rustic tables behind him, “She’s all right, Sylvia. Tell Aunt Flora she’s all right.”
Gabrielle heard a thick, fretful murmur in answer, and asked, in a child’s awed whisper:
“Is Aunt Flora sick?”
“Frightened,” David said, in answer. “And you fainted, dear. Tom and I got you down by the kitchen stairway.”
Recollection was beginning to come back rapidly now, and Gay frowned faintly with the pain of it as she said: