A great awe fell upon Gabrielle as she went up to the crowded little bedroom. She could see nothing except Aunt Flora, lying straight in the girlish little bed with its paper and ribbon souvenirs tied to the white enamel bars; Aunt Flora looking sunken-cheeked and ghastly, and living only in her restless and tortured eyes.
“How do you feel now?” David said, cheerfully, sitting down beside the bed, and patting her hand. She did not smile. But she moved her eyes to his face and fixed them there.
Sylvia was at one side of the bed, David and Tom took chairs at the foot, and Gabrielle quite naturally sank to her knees beside Sylvia, so that the two girls’ faces were close to Flora’s.
It was afternoon now, a steely-clear winter afternoon at about four o’clock, and to Gabrielle’s wearied senses no hour in the strange twenty-four since she and David had walked in the great wind to Crowchester seemed more strange or unreal than this one. Aunt Flora lying here, grizzled, dressed in one of the plain nightgowns of John’s wife’s and surrounded by little Etta’s keepsakes; Tom serious and still, oddly dishevelled and disorderly from the long night and the day’s broken rest; Sylvia pale, and with new and tragic deeps in her dark eyes; and David as always the balance wheel that seemed to keep them all steady.
Flora moved her solemn gaze to Gabrielle’s face.
“I am very sick,” she whispered.
“Oh, Aunt Flora, you’ll feel so much better when you get into a comfortable hospital,” Gabrielle said, gently, infinitely distressed.
“No,” the sick woman said, shaking her head, “they’ll not move me! David told you and Tom something yesterday,” she added, wearily shutting her eyes and hardly moving her lips. “You should have known it long ago. You—and Tom, are angry at me?”
“Oh, Aunt Flora—no!”
“You are Roger Fleming’s daughter, Gabrielle,” Flora whispered, clutching her hand, and eyeing her anxiously.