“Me!” said Gabrielle Fleming, in a sharp whisper that echoed like a pistol shot in the room. Her dilated eyes moved to David’s face.
“I told you last night, Gay,” David said, gently.
“You told me—yes, but I thought my mother—I thought Lily—I only thought that she had loved Uncle Roger, instead of the man Charpentier!” the girl stammered. “I—I am their child——” she whispered.
She got to her feet, her eyes upon the distance, her mouth working, and walked bewilderedly to the door.
“Mamma!” Sylvia said, sharply, as Flora moaned and seemed to contract into something smaller than her already shrunken self as she sank deep into the white pillow. “Tom, give me that medicine,” Sylvia commanded, in a frightened, low tone.
“Bring her back, David!” Flora said, struggling to raise herself and following Gabrielle with her eyes. “She must hear.”
“Gay,” David said, at the girl’s elbow. She gave him a dazed look devoid of any expression whatsoever. “Aunt Flora wants us all to listen,” the man said.
Without protest she came back to her place at the bedside.
The sunset was dying from the walls now, and a dull wintry chill was falling through the cold dark afternoon air. Flora looked fixedly at Gabrielle, who, pale and tense, with a bitten lower lip and star-sapphire eyes widened with excitement and pain, never moved her gaze from her face.
“Cecily was so ill,” said Flora, after a moment, “that for two or three days they feared for her life. I got a good nurse, and stayed at the hospital myself, and sent the tiny new baby to my apartment, when she was about nine days old, trying all the time to get in touch with Roger in San Francisco. He had sailed then, for Guam, but we did not know that until weeks later, when the telegrams all came back. But there was no attempt at secrecy.