“Between Lily and Charpentier? Certainly!” she answered, sharply. And suspiciously she added: “What makes you ask that?”
“It has sometimes gone through my head that there might not have been—that that might account for her despair and her death,” David suggested. “Not that it matters much,” he added, more briskly. “What matters is that here we have Gabrielle, a young thing of eighteen, apparently all over her early frailness and delicateness—at least, I gather so?” he interrupted himself to ask, with another upward glance.
“The Superior writes that she is in perfect health.”
“Good. So here we have Gabrielle,” resumed David, “eighteen, finished off most satisfactorily by almost eight years with the good Sisters and with two post-graduate years in the Paris convent—discovered not to have a vocation——”
“Which I profoundly hoped she would have!” put in Flora, forcefully.
“Oh, come, Aunt Flora—the poor little thing! Why should she be a religious if she doesn’t want to? After all, she’s your sister’s child and your own Sylvia’s cousin—give her a chance!” David pleaded, good-naturedly.
Flora looked at him temperately, patiently.
“But of course I shall give her a chance, David!” she said, quietly. “She will unquestionably have some plan for herself. I shall see that it is helped, if it is reasonable. But in the old days,” Flora added, “she was treated exactly as a child of the house. She must not expect that now. There have been changes since then, David. Poor Tom’s loss, Roger’s death—poor Mamma’s death——”
She was silent. David, staring thoughtfully into the fire, was silent, too. The strangely repressive influence of the twilight, the old room, the cold, reminiscent voice that somehow rang of the tomb, the autumn winds beginning to whine softly about the old house, and beyond and above and through all sounds the quiet steady suck and rising rush of the sea, the scream of little pebbles beneath the shrill fine crying of gulls in the dusk, had taken possession of his spirit again. Something mysterious, unhappy about it all—something especially so about Flora—was oppressing him once more.
But why? David asked himself, angrily. Here was a widowed woman, living in an old house only a few miles from the very heart of civilization, contented with her solitude, yet counting the hours until her idolized daughter’s return to Wastewater for the summer months; conscientious in the discharge of her duty where Gabrielle, her sister’s motherless little girl, was concerned, spending her days peacefully among servants and flowers, books and memories.