However, she took the drink, when Gabrielle held the glass, in short sips, meanwhile patting the girl’s hand, beaming, and occasionally, with increasing drowsiness, recalling old memories.
“Gabrielle had a little gray coat and a hat with gray fur on it—beaver, it was real beaver—it looked so good with her golden curls!” she said once, complacently. “Roger said she looked like a squirrel. Where is Roger, Flora? Why don’t he come up some night, so’s we could all play euchre, like we use’ to?”
And at another time, some moments later, she added, in a sweet and natural voice: “I was looking all over the place for Tom. He gets my nasturtium seeds and eats them! But I don’t know where all this snow’s come from. It was real sunny yesterday when I put them out, and Roger and Will were in swimming!”
All this time Flora had sat in an armchair by the stove, with one hard, veiny hand tight over her eyes. Margret lessened the lights, Lily began to sink into sleep, and Gabrielle sat timidly down near her, still holding her hand. The servants slipped away, but still Flora did not stir.
When Lily was so soundly off that their voices did not disturb her, David touched Gabrielle’s arm, and stiff, and looking a little bewildered, she rose noiselessly to her feet. Flora started up, pale, and with a bitten under lip and a look of some deep fright in her eyes, and they quietly left the room, David carrying the lamp as before.
“And now,” he said, cheerfully, when they were back in the hall outside of Gabrielle’s room, “there’s no good worrying ourselves about all this to-night! You look exhausted, Aunt Flora, and Gay here has had enough. Jump into bed, Gay, it’s after two, and get off to sleep. I’ll leave my door open and you leave yours—or if you like I’ll wheel this couch up against your door and sleep on it myself.”
“No, David, thank you; I’m not afraid now,” the girl said, quietly and seriously, and David knew that there were more than vague unnamed terrors to occupy her thoughts now. “I’ll do splendidly, and to-morrow we’ll talk. I only hope,” she added slowly, “my mother will not be ill, although”—and there was infinite sadness in her voice—“perhaps I shouldn’t even hope that, for her! Good-night, Aunt Flora.”
And with a sudden impulse that seemed to David infinitely fine and sweet, she stooped and kissed her aunt’s cheek before she turned to her own door.
“Good-night, Gay dear, don’t worry!” David said, tenderly. And with a quick emotion as natural as hers had been, he kissed her forehead as a brother might have done. Flora had already gone, and Gay smiled at him pathetically as she shut her door.
She would not think to-night, the girl told herself restlessly. But there was nothing for it but thought. She was bitterly cold, and shuddered as she snuggled into the covers, and stared out with persistently wakeful eyes at the blackness of the big room. Gay heard creaks, crackling, the lisp of falling blots of snow, the detonations of contracting furniture in distant closed rooms, the reports of breaking branches outside. And always there was the cold, regular pulse of the sea.