She sank into quiet, and almost immediately breathed as if she were deeply asleep. Sylvia, not changing her position by a hair’s breadth, signalled to the others a question as to the propriety of their slipping away. But no one had stirred when Flora quite simply opened her eyes, and said in a relieved tone:
“I want you to know everything. You don’t blame me too much, Sylvia? Have I told you”—she added, anxious and alarmed—“did I tell you about Gabrielle?”
“Mamma, darling—to-morrow——?”
“No, no,” Flora said, feverishly, “to-day! I had told you of my marrying—yes, and that poor little Lily seemed so upset.
“She had always been a forlorn, sentimental little thing, Lily. There had been different admirers, and she always took them seriously, weeping and questioning herself and her motives until my mother and I used to want to shake her. But after my mother’s death, and your mother’s death, David, and when you boys went off to school, she became gently melancholy—yet not always sad, either, but wandering a little, and strange.
“There was a handsome, good-for-nothing sort of fellow hanging about at Tinsalls in Keyport then. Charpentier his name was—he was an agent for something, if he was anything. He and Lily used to walk along the cliff road, and sometimes she would cry and tell Cecily that he was as fine a gentleman as any man she knew, only unfortunate—that sort of thing.
“I didn’t like it, but I dreaded telling Roger, for he was so quickly roused to anger, and I thought he might horsewhip the man and drive Lily clean out of her senses.
“Well, one day, when Sylvia was almost three, and Will had been in the West for six months or so, and when Cecily was all upset and lying on the couch like a little waxen ghost, Margret Nolan came to me—this same Margret we have now; she was an old servant here even then—and shaking all over and crying—poor Margret!—she told me that she was ‘worried’ about Miss Lily.
“‘If that ruffian Charpentier has taken advantage of her, poor little wandering-witted thing that she is, I think they’ll hang him!’ she said.
“I was sick with the shame and the fright of it. I knew Roger would go after any man that touched one of his household with a revolver. It was all terrifying to me, but I told Margret—whom poor Lily had taken into her confidence—to go after the man Charpentier, find out if he could marry Lily, and keep the whole thing absolutely secret. It meant banishment for Lily from Cecily’s presence, I knew that, for Cecily had a horror of such things—had a horror even of little babies and their needs—used to shut her eyes with a sort of sickness if I nursed Sylvia, or discussed one of her little illnesses in her room. Such a thing as this would have revolted her!