“Oh, yes!”
“Ah,” David said, blindly trying to say something that should avert her too-close scrutiny, “I see.”
He felt his heart leaden. It was with sort of physical difficulty that he guided her through the new Wastewater that was yet in so many ways the old.
So much was his anyway, he told himself. This day of her dear companionship, this luncheon on the rocks, this monopoly of her husky and wonderful voice, her earnest, quick glances, her laughter, were his for a little while. Even over the utter desolation of his spirit, he was won to an exquisite and yet agonizing happiness by this nearness of all her sweetness and charm again.
First, she must see the plans. They sat down upon a pile of clear lumber in the trembling green shade of overhanging maple branches, and pegged the fluttering blue sheets with bits of rock, and bent over them.
And now, as she eagerly identified the placing of casement windows and bricked terraces, she was so close that David got the actual flowery fragrance of her, and her warm, satin-smooth hand occasionally touched his. She had laid aside her big coat, and looked a little less impressive in the plain little suit and delicate white frills, and somehow all the more her own wonderful self, the eager, busy, interested little Gay of years ago.
“David, see here, dear——” She added the little word so unconsciously, he thought, with a pang! “See here, dear, these two rooms upstairs will be almost empty—this with a north light, in case my smart cousin should want to do some painting.”
“Do you mean that you and Tom and Sylvia really plan to make your home here?” David asked.
“As for Tom, I can’t say—he and Sylvia will surely spend their summers here. But this will always be home, headquarters, for me,” Gay said. And she laid her beautiful hand upon the blue-prints almost with a caress. “My little house!” she said, lovingly, “with its chimney seats and casement windows—and we must have roses and hollyhocks jammed up against them in summer, and with its darling white woodwork and pink and blue papers, and with its little breakfast room looking over the sea——”
“Not so little,” David warned her, “you will have a dozen rooms, you know, besides the servants’ quarters in that high roof that John dislikes so heartily.”