The books that filled the handsome glass-doored shelves in the dimly lighted, mouldy library, where light crept as into a cave, and where the air was always damp and heavily scented with decay, were almost all ruined after some especially wet winter. Their backs were loosened, their badly printed pages clung together with black stains: Lever and Scott, Shakespeare, The Iliad, Somebody’s History of the World in Twenty Volumes, Somebody Else’s Classic Literature in Forty. Sometimes Gabrielle selected one or two, and carried them upstairs with her. She read voraciously anything and everything: “Innocents Abroad,” “Forty-one Years in India,” “The Household Book of English Verse,” Strickland’s “Mary of Scotland.”
But even with reading, wandering, tramping, exploring, music, languages, the time passed slowly. Gabrielle became, and laughed to find herself becoming, deeply interested in Aunt Flora’s evening game of solitaire. Perhaps the two women never came quite so close to each other as then, when Gay bent her bright head interestedly above the cards, and Flora, with a card suspended, listened to advice. Affectionate, and hungry for affection, Gabrielle was oddly touched when she realized that Flora really liked her companionship at this time, if at no other. Gay had been perhaps a week at Wastewater when one evening, Flora, shuffling her packs, said mildly:
“Don’t tire your eyes, Gabrielle, with that book!”
Gabrielle looked up, saw that the game was about to be commenced. She had turned back to “Stratton” again, with a grateful smile, when Flora said again:
“Was it last night when five aces came out in the first row?”
This was enough. The girl closed her book, leaned forward. Presently she took a lighter chair, on the other side of the little card table, and after that she always did.
On one of these evenings, when the wind was crying and they two seemed alone, not only in the house, but in the world, Gay asked suddenly:
“Aunt Flora, does anybody live in that north wing, opposite where I am but on the same floor?”
“I don’t understand you. How could—how do you mean?” said Mrs. Fleming. Gay saw that she had turned a deathly colour, and was breathing badly, and she told herself remorsefully that such a query, hurled unexpectedly into the silence, might well terrify any nervous elderly woman, living alone.
Eager to simplify matters, she recounted her odd experience on the very first night after her return. She had often looked over in that direction since, she went on, but had seen nothing. But, weary and confused that first night, she might never have gotten to sleep but for the reassuring knowledge that David was so near!