“Oh, David—Wastewater again!” she said. “If you knew—if you knew how hungry I’ve been for the old place! Oh, David—what a wonderful barn—but isn’t it delicious—and that’s your house, Etta, and it looks so comfortable—like a little English inn—and the arch—David, it’s all so wonderful! Oh, do tell me everything, everyone! I’m so glad to get home——”
He had known that he loved her, but David had never dreamed that he could love her like this. To see her take off the heavy brown coat and consign it and the fur to Etta, and to have her straighten her little white frills at throat and wrists of the trim little dark blue suit, in just her old, busy way, and to have her fairly dance along at his side, excitedly inspecting all that had happened and that was to happen, was to be transported—for David—straight into a country of no laws and no precedents. Gay, sweet and blue-eyed and husky of voice; Gay, slender and eager and responsive; Gay, home again.
“But let me tell Etta and John my news before we leave them,” she had said, in the first rush of greetings. “Who do you think has just gotten married?”
“Not you, Miss Gabrielle, although goodness knows you look happy enough for anything,” Etta had said, cheered in spite of her determined efforts to resist.
“Not I—do you hear her, David! No, I’m to be next,” Gabrielle had answered, with a gaiety that stabbed David to the heart. “No, but Miss Sylvia and Mr. Tom were married a month ago, before we ever left San Francisco,” she added, joyously.
“Good grief!” Etta said, in a hushed voice. David only fixed astonished and suddenly enlightened eyes upon the girl’s face.
“Married in San Francisco,” Gabrielle repeated, nodding triumphantly. “You’re not one bit more surprised than I am! Well, yes, for I did suspect it,” she added, more moderately. “I knew that they were falling in love with each other, of course. But I never dreamed that they had done it until we were three days out! Then Sylvia wouldn’t let me wireless, because she said everybody on the boat would know. So we went on to Panama, and then she and Tom wanted to go on farther, and Margret and I wanted to come home—and here I am!”
Etta was by this time sufficiently recovered from her stupefaction to ask for further details, and David, watching Gabrielle as she half laughingly and half seriously gave them, had time to appreciate how the girl had grown to womanhood in this time of absence. With a sort of negligent readiness, and yet with a certain dignity, too, she satisfied the eager questions of the older man and woman, all the while reserving, he could see, the more intimate narrative for his ears alone.
They were not to be alone immediately, however, for Etta and John accompanied them through the barns, Etta harping plaintively upon the quality of the buildings now in course of erection in the Crowchester Manor Estates.
“But you won’t want a big house here, all by yourself. Them Crowchester houses are handsomer than any Mr. Rucker ever showed me,” Etta said.