She had given him, on this spring day of lingering lights and soft fragrance, such a revelation of her own sweetness, her own personality, as made all his other recollections of her seem pale and dim. Every turn of her head, every movement, every direct look from her star-sapphire eyes, had deepened the old impression that there was nobody quite like her in the world.
Nobody so gracious, so quietly joyous, nobody else at once so youthful and so wise. A hundred times, by some quality of being simply and eagerly happy just in the springtime, and the garden, and his company, she reminded him of the long-ago little girl Gabrielle, and yet, at twenty, David thought her already a woman.
They talked of the old Wastewater, as they planned and went to and fro busied with problems of the proportions and the placing of the new. Of the family, with its passions and hates, its jealousies and weaknesses.
“The new house,” Gabrielle said, whimsically, “will stand as much for the new order as the old one did for the stupidities and affectations of the old. It’s all to be simple, no affectations, no great big gloomy basement regions for the servants—they’ll have their section as comfortable, as sunshiny as the other. There’ll be open fires instead of the old hideous grates, and rugs and clean floors instead of the old dirty, hard-and-fast carpets, and bathrooms full of tiles and sunshine, and sleeping porches instead of all that horrible rep curtaining—and there’ll be——”
Her voice lowered. “There’ll be people loving each other,” she said. “After all, isn’t that the answer to the whole problem? Women being loyal and generous, instead of jealous and watching all the time, men thinking of other people’s happiness, instead of having themselves painted in picturesque attitudes.”
She finished laughing, but her face was presently serious again. They were idly wandering through the ruins of the garden now, Gabrielle a little flushed and tumbled from the efforts of raising a bent rose bush, or straightening, with a little air of anxiety and concentration that David thought somehow touchingly mother-like, a sheaf of timidly budded whips that would some day be sweet with white syringa bloom.
She stopped at the old sundial and cleared the fallen packed damp leaves from its face with a stick, and busied herself so earnestly about it that David thought her more like an adorable child, and more like a responsible little housewife, than ever. He thought of the wife she would make some man some day, and felt suddenly that he must get away—out of the country—anywhere!—before that time came.
“You can’t tell me your plans yet, Gabrielle dear?” he said, with a rather dry throat, when they were beside the dial.
The girl’s colour deepened a little under the creamy skin, and for a moment she did not answer. Then she said with a look straight into his eyes:
“I could tell you—as far as they have gone.”