“Cecily was now all anxiety to get back to Wastewater. She said that she never wanted to see again the cruel old doctor who had frightened her so. I explained the situation to him, and presently we all came back to Wastewater, leaving Carrie behind us simply because she did not want to come.
“Hannah Rosecrans was engaged to be married, she was with us only a few weeks, and then went to Australia, where her husband has become well-to-do. She idolized the baby, and loved Lily, too, but I suppose, servant-fashion, she gave the other servants to believe that there was something amiss. Anyway, it was always ‘Miss Lily’s baby,’ from the very first. Lily had told Margret about her troubles months before, and I was never in any doubt what Margret thought.
“As for Cecily, she seemed to think it settled. Our Crowchester doctor was recalled, but there was nothing he could do except keep her quiet. She was sinking very fast; she died when Gabrielle was only seven or eight weeks old.
“Roger got home too late—the day before the funeral—but even then I thought that any accident might show him the truth. I told myself that in all this confusion it would only sadden him more. I—I don’t know now what I thought, or why I did what I did! But Lily and the baby and Margret had their own suite of rooms, and Roger naturally paid little attention to them—in his grief for his wife. He saw the baby, took it for granted she was Lily’s. And I told myself that sometime I would of course tell him the whole story, or somebody would. He would meet the old doctor who had attended Cecily, or the doctor who had attended Lily, in Boston. Or he might run across Carrie, or Hannah Rosecrans——
“Cecily was buried here where we buried Lily only last spring. Roger went off on his searches, came home—gray-headed and so changed!—went off again. And I never told him.
“I had begun it to protect Cecily, to comfort Lily—I never had planned it; it all seemed to come about of itself, and for the first six years of her life Gabrielle called Lily ‘Mamma.’ Then Lily became very bad, and we put her in a sanitarium, and she never knew. And then Will Fleming, my husband, died, and I thought——
“Fool that I was,” Flora added, after a pause, with infinite fatigue and a sort of self-contempt in her voice, “I cared for Roger even then—I cared for him even then. I was widowed, and he twice a widower. He loved my child, but he loved Gabrielle as well. I could not—I could not put Cecily Fleming’s child ahead of mine. Roger needed me, he turned to me for everything. I could not see his little girl—placed ahead of me—pushing me out of his life——
“I couldn’t!” she said more loudly, choking. “I had given my life to him—my whole life! He had trampled me under his feet. Gabrielle was fair—she was like Cecily’s mother—she was a beautiful baby. I knew he would give his whole heart to her, live for her——
“One day he said that he was going to change his will, make a generous provision for Lily’s poor little girl, and I was glad. It wasn’t money that mattered—to me. I would have starved for him. He said that in case his boy never came back, the little girls should share and share alike, like sisters, and I was glad. There was never any plan in what I did—I used to think that any hour might change it, any chance word! I knew that Roger had written a will in Janet’s day, when Tom was a baby, and when he might have had half-a-dozen other children, but after this talk he had a good many interviews with his lawyer, and I supposed that he had done what he said.
“He was not here very much; I came to believe that he hated the old place, and me, and Lily, and everything that reminded him that he had once been young and free with the world at his feet. I used to think that even if he had found Tom, he would have gone on wandering. But at last, when he came home, it was to die. He died—you remember, David, quite quietly and without pain, one summer day—he had been warned of his heart. He was packing to go off to Panama, a doctor there had written that there was a young fellow just answering Tom’s description—with—with whatever it is when a man loses all memory—amnesia——