The old woman had been turning herself uneasily, looking with rapidly blinking eyes from one to the other. Now the servants were gently urging her toward the doorway that led to the warm kitchen regions, and to Gabrielle’s amazement she seemed to be displaying a weak disinclination to go.
“Who’s this girl, Flora?” she said now, in a cracked, querulous voice. “You stop pushing me, Margret!” she added, fretfully.
It was Gabrielle’s turn to show amazement and consternation. She looked from one stricken, conscious face to another, and her own bright, frost-glowing cheeks faded a little. This trembling bit of human wreckage, dragged in from the storm, was not quite a stranger, at all events.
Flora’s face was ghastly; Hedda looked more than ordinarily idiotic. But Margret, eighty years old, spoke hearteningly.
“It’s old Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Fleming, from Keyport. She’s——” Margret had one stout old arm about the cowering stranger, and now she gave the other women a significant glance and tapped her own forehead with her free hand. “We’ll give her some tea and dry her out a bit, and then maybe John’ll take her home,” said Margret, “when he takes the sleigh in for Miss Fleming!”
Gabrielle, perfectly satisfied with the explanation and the arrangement, went upstairs beside her aunt.
“Oh, will John have the big sleigh out?” she asked, enthusiastically. Flora did not answer; she looked ill. She parted from Gabrielle without a word and went downstairs. But half an hour later, when the girl had had a hot bath and was busy with the bright masses of her hair before her mirror, she started suddenly to find that her aunt had come quietly into the room.
By this time Gabrielle had had time to think over her little adventure, and even in all the day’s excitement and expectation she had felt an uncomfortable reaction from it. She shuddered whenever she remembered herself hurrying so innocently along the snowy lanes in the twilight, and the hideous fright of that first sight of something moving—something human, shadowy gray and white against the gray and white shadows of the hedge.
“That was a horrid experience with that poor old woman, Aunt Flora,” she said now, distressed at her own emotion.
“You must think no more about it,” Flora, giving no reason for her visit to Gabrielle’s room, said firmly. “The girls have taken good care of her, and John is to drive her back when he goes. She’s perfectly harmless—poor soul. I would rather you didn’t mention it to Sylvia, Gabrielle, by the way.”