“Sylvia—and Gabrielle, too!” he reminded her.
“Oh, Gabrielle?” She repeated the name quietly. “To be sure, she will marry,” she said, musingly. “But I can hardly feel that quite as much my affair as Sylvia’s future, David,” she finished, mildly.
“Daughter and niece!” David summarized it. “Sylvia rich and Gabrielle penniless, but both young and both our girls!”
“I can’t see it quite that way,” Mrs. Fleming said, thoughtfully, after a pause. “Gabrielle gets here to-night—you knew that?”
“That’s what brings me,” he answered. “I thought perhaps you would like me to meet her in Boston, bring her home?”
“I wired in answer to the Mother Superior’s wire,” Flora said, “that she was quite capable of making the journey herself. She should be here at about eight to-night. She is eighteen, David. There is no necessity of making a child of her!”
“No,” he conceded, good-humouredly. “But it might seem a little warmer welcome. I’ll go in to Crowchester for her, at least. After all, we’ve not seen her for years—for more than two years! When I was in Paris—when Jim Rucker and I were on our way to Spain—it was midsummer, and she and some of the other girls and nuns were in Normandy. I shall be glad to see her again.”
“I wish,” said Mrs. Fleming, slowly, “that I could say as much. But her return brings it all up again, David. I shall do all I can for her, try my best to place her well. But when I think of my delicate little sister,” Flora rushed on, in a voice suddenly shaking, “and of her giving her life for this unwelcome child—the old bitterness rises up in me——!”
She stopped as if she were choking, and with set lips and inflated nostrils sat breathing quickly and looking into the fire, shaken by the painful agitation of a passion usually suppressed.
“I know. I know,” David, who came nearer than any one else in the world to intimacy with this woman, said soothingly. “But it wasn’t Gabrielle’s fault that poor little Aunt Lily made a stupid marriage with a—what was he? A travelling agent? Surely—surely, if you loved Aunt Lily, you can make up all the sorrow and shame of it to Gabrielle! There was—there was a marriage there, Aunt Flora?” David added, with a keen look up from his own finely shaped hands, now linked and hanging between his knees as he sat forward in his low chair.