Gay, kneeling by the hearth and hammering a great smoking lump of coal with a poker, felt salt in her mouth, and her heart sank like a leaden weight. Sylvia’s serious yet happy tone was unmistakable. The younger girl did not turn.
“You mean—you and David——?” she said, thickly, putting one arm across her eyes as if the smoke had blinded her.
“I think so,” Sylvia answered, smiling quietly and mysteriously.
Gay took her chair. “I always thought so!” she said, bravely. “Has it been settled—long?”
“It isn’t settled now!” Sylvia responded, in a little tone of merry warning and alarm. “But I have promised”—and her smile was that of the consciously beloved and courted woman—“I have promised to think about it!”
When David came down with the suitcases a few minutes later Sylvia was alone. Gay did not come in until just before dinner, and then she seemed quiet and grave. David suspected that Sylvia’s departure and the ending of the happy holidays were depressing her, but two or three times, catching her serious glance fixed upon himself during the evening, he was puzzled by something more serious than this, something almost reproachful, almost accusing.
However, he forgot it in the confusion of the early start the next morning, and when he returned to Wastewater late that evening, Gay seemed quite herself. David stayed on comfortably from day to day, and the three settled to a pleasant, if monotonous and quiet, life.
Gay worked busily at her music and with her books all morning and now and then had the additional interest of a postcard from one of the Montallens, or one of Frank du Spain’s singularly undeveloped and youthful letters to answer. David was painting a study of the old sheds and fences on the western side of the house, buried in a heavy snow, with snow-laden trees bowed about them, and as a fresh blizzard came along early in the year, and the first study was extremely successful, he delayed to make a second.
In the cold afternoons he and Gay usually went for long walks, talking hard all the way, and David found it as often astonishingly stimulating to get her views of men and affairs and books as it was pleasant to guide her or influence her. Sometimes, bundled to the ears, she would rush out to the old cow yard to stand behind him as he painted, and what she said of his work, he thought, was always worth hearing. He was to have an exhibition in New York for a week in the early spring, and it was at Gay’s suggestion that he did some small water colours for it.
“There!” she said. “Now those things that you call ‘notes’—those are perfectly delightful! And many a person who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—spend several hundred dollars for a picture would love one of those.”