“It was a dark, misty day, I remember, with the garden full of thick cold fog, and lights burning at the lunch table. He and I had come out and were walking along the cliff road in the mist. We could hear the buoys ringing—ringing away toward Keyport.
“‘Flo,’ he said, ‘when that time is up, will you forgive me and marry me? You and I understand each other. I want to be anchored. I want to be done with the world and make this my world!’ And he looked back toward the garden and the house.
“‘Gladly, Roger!’ I said. And for a long while we did not speak again. Then he said to me, ‘Will you tell Lily and the boys and Will that it is to be that way?’ and I said yes. You remember, David?”
“Yes, I remember your telling us that you were to be married to him,” David’s voice said, strangely vital against that other monotonous voice.
“Sometimes—but not often!—we would talk of it quietly,” Flora resumed. “Not that I was ever happy about it. But I told myself I would be! I told myself that it should—it must—mean happiness to us both.
“Janet died in January. This was—perhaps—March.
“A few days later, in April, a Mrs. Kent, whom Roger had admired immensely as a beautiful girl when he was hardly more than a boy—when he was, in fact, in college—came here with her daughter for a visit. I don’t think the mother was more than thirty-seven or -eight; she had been a great belle and had married at eighteen. She was plump and pretty, covered with jewels, full of life, and had left her husband and little boy in Canada to bring this child from a school in Baltimore. She had—just this hair,” Flora said, laying her dark thin hand upon Gabrielle’s tawny rich masses as the girl knelt beside her.
“The girl Cecily was seventeen, dark, and pale-faced. She looked like a child—she had her hair in a braid.
“There were other old friends in the party, a group of them had come down from Boston to see Roger Fleming, and we were very gay. I don’t know that I ever heard greater laughing or chattering here, or that we ever served more formal meals—I had my hands full. Lily saw more of little Cecily Kent than I did, and she told me one day—not that it interested me particularly then!—that the girl had been attending a convent in Montreal and longed to be a nun, and that her mother had said that she would rather see her dead.
“They were only here a short week—it was spring, and there were walks and picnics, and bridge and music and billiards—the time flew by. And it was on the afternoon when the Kents were going, their baggage in the hall, and when the other guests had gone, that Cecily Kent burst out crying, and Roger put his arm about her.