“Oh, David, David!” said Aunt Flora, between a laugh and a sob.
“Well, anyway, Tom and I used to think Uncle Will’s songs the most delightful things we ever heard,” David went on. “So that was the family when I was very small: Mother, Dad, as we both called Uncle Roger, Aunt Flora, Aunt Lily—who was very delicate and romantic—Uncle Will and his banjo, and of course Aunt John, who was a little wisp of a gray woman—— What is it, Gay?”
For Gay had made a sudden exclamation.
“Nothing,” the girl said, quickly, clearing her throat. She looked very pale in the warm firelight.
“Then they sent Tom and me off to school in Connecticut. And then,” and David’s voice lowered suddenly, and he looked straight ahead of him into the coals, “then our mother died very suddenly—do you remember that you drove the buckboard into Crowchester to meet us, Aunt Flora, when we came home?”
“Ah, yes!” Flora said, from a deep reverie.
David, fitting it all together in his memory, remembered now that in here, chronologically, came Flora’s engagement to Roger Fleming. But he looked up at the picture above the mantel, and then at her face, absent-eyed and stern now, and cupped in her hand, as if to promise that that secret at least should not be betrayed.
“Less than a year after my mother’s death,” he went on, “Uncle Roger married again, a very young girl—Cecily—Kent, was it, Aunt Flora?”
“Cecily Kent,” Flora echoed, briefly.
“Who was very delicate, and who was in fact dying for years,” David went on. “Anyway, that same year Aunt Flora married Uncle Will and—well, that’s where Sylvia comes in, and little Aunt Lily married a man named Charpentier, and that’s where Gabrielle comes in. And a few years later Tom ran away. That broke my stepfather’s heart, and I suppose his wife’s health didn’t cheer him up exactly. And then my stepfather’s little second wife died, and then Uncle Will died,” David summarized it all rapidly, “and after he had hunted my half-brother, Tom, for years, he died!” And David finished with a final nod toward Roger’s picture.