“Well, after that,” and Gay’s laugh was delicious to hear, “you should have seen Sylvia! She—glowed! I never saw her so handsome, and so happy, and so—well, you know her!—so superb. She was all the proud wife. Everything Tom did was mysteriously perfect, and everything he said she listened to with as much attention as if it were his dying words. She quoted him, she fenced herself off with him with rugs and deck chairs and books, and read to him; they walked round and round the deck together.
“It seems as if Sylvia must be a little superior on some count or other to be happy!” Gay commented, affectionately and amusedly. “Now she’s infinitely happy. She is Mrs. Tom Fleming, and she has a handsome, rich husband who adores her, and presently they’ll have the most superior children—and believe me,” the girl finished, laughing, “Sylvia will feel that just what those children do is the astonishing thing; if any other child is taller, she’ll say it is weedy and has outgrown its strength, and if any child is smarter she’ll say it is unpleasantly precocious!”
“So you got to Panama——?” David prompted after a silence devoted to smiling musing, and the warmth and sweetness of the day, and the delicate silver whisper of the sea among the rocks.
“So we got to Panama, and by this time Mr. and Mrs. Tom Fleming only wanted to be left alone,” Gay resumed, raising her blue eyes to smile at him. “So there were great debates. They didn’t want to wire you, because such a wire is very apt to be noticed, and they didn’t quite want to come home; in fact, they planned this Southern trip as a sort of supplementary honeymoon. So, as there was a charming navy woman, a Mrs. Stephens, coming all the way up, I was delighted to put myself and Margret in her care. And that’s all.”
She had packed the remains of their meal into the little basket in the old quick, capable way that David so well remembered, and now she descended to a certain little pool among the rocks, and washed her hands, pushing the frills of her cuffs back from her slender wrists as she did so, and waving her hands in the air to dry them.
“You’ve told me everything—except your own affair, Gabrielle,” David presently prompted, when they were making their way up the cliff path to the garden.
“My—my own affair?” Perhaps she had not understood, for although she turned scarlet suddenly, she made no further admission.
“There is—somebody, you told me once?” David prompted her.
“Oh, yes!” She dismissed it with a shrug. “That,” she said, with a thoughtful note in her voice.
She added no more at the time. The enchanted hours of the day moved to three o’clock. But when David, knowing her to be tired from the long trip and probably confused with all the changes and impressions, suggested their return to Keyport, she showed a reluctance as definite as his own.