“But would you want her really to—to work, Sylvia?” demanded her mother, as David, staring into the embers, with his locked hands dropped between his knees, was still silent.
“Well, but, Mamma, wouldn’t you?” Sylvia countered. “With her antecedents, perhaps inheriting that unfortunate nature of poor Aunt Lily’s——”
“You never saw Aunt Lily!” David was upon the point of saying, good-naturedly. But although Sylvia had indeed been only three or four years old when frail, melancholy Aunt Lily had made the final disappearance into a sanitarium that ended much later with her death, he realized that Aunt Flora had talked frequently about her and held his peace.
“Inheriting that unhappy nature from Aunt Lily,” pursued Sylvia, “and inheriting goodness knows what from that casual father of hers—who might, I suppose, turn up here any day and make trouble for all of us—it does seem to me wisest to lay the basis of a normal, useful life of her——”
“Her father’s dead!” Flora interrupted, with a sort of pain in her voice, as Sylvia paused.
“You don’t know that, Mamma.”
“No, but if he isn’t,” David said, “he’s dead to us. He has built up a new life somewhere that he is only too anxious to keep from our knowledge. If he had been in trouble he would have appeared fast enough!”
“Still, Sylvia,” said Flora, trembling, “I should wish—and I know David would—that Gay should have some sort of allowance made for her, always. I know your uncle—I know Roger would want her not to have to worry about money—say, a hundred and fifty a month! Or two hundred——”
“Do you mean just paid out of the estate?” Sylvia demanded, in honest astonishment, and with a natural little resentment that her plans for Gay should be so outdistanced by the others’ ideas. “But, David—don’t you think that would be too ridiculous?” she asked, anxiously turning toward him, after a surprised study of her mother’s flushed face.
“I think we can arrange it very nicely, somehow,” David said, soothingly. “No need to go into it now, for she will certainly stay here with Aunt Flora until you come home, at midsummer. And in the meantime she may either form her own plans, or perhaps,” he added more lightly, “perhaps another Frank du Spain will come on the scene, with better success!”