The girl looked at her watch; twenty minutes of three, and she seemed to have been tossing here for hours. Her brain seethed; faces, voices, came and went, problems for the future, speculations as to the past. She was deathly cold; she wondered if there were any fuel at her cold fireplace, lighted the candle, and investigated. None.
“Well, these windows at least can be closed!” Gay decided, with chattering teeth. The night struck through her thin nightgown like a wall of ice as she struggled with the heavy blinds. Gabrielle experienced a weary and desperate sensation of discouragement; the horrible night would never end, her thoughts would never straighten themselves out into peace and quiet again, there would never be sunlight, warmth, safety in the world!
Looking down, however, toward the kitchen wing, she saw that a heartening red light was striking through the shutters, and immediately she caught up her wrapper and went slippered and shuddering down the long stairs and passages that led to the kitchen.
She opened the door upon heartening lamplight and firelight; Margret, Trude, and Hedda were in comfortable talk beside the stove, and a boiling coffee-pot sent a delicious fragrance into the dark old room.
“Margret,” Gay began, piteously, with a suddenly childish feeling of tears in her voice. “I can’t sleep—I’ve been lying awake——”
And immediately she was on her knees beside Margret, and had her bright head buried in the old servant’s lap, and Margret’s hand was stroking her hair.
Gay, after the first tears, did not cry. But as the blessed heat and light seemed to penetrate to the centre of her chilled being, and as the old servant’s hands gently stroked her hair, she felt as if she could kneel here for ever, not facing anything, not thinking, just warm again and among human voices once more.
Margret’s words, if they were words, were indistinguishable; neither Hedda nor Trude spoke at all. The Belgian women looked on with their faded old eyes red with sympathy. Trude put a smoking cup of coffee, mixed in the French fashion, as Gay liked it, on the table, and Hedda turned a fresh piece of graham toast on the range, and Margret coaxed the girl to dispose of the hot drink before there was any talk.
Afterward, when Gay had dried her eyes upon a towel brought by the sympathetic Hedda, and rolled herself tight in her wrapper, and had her feet comfortably extended toward the range, Margret said:
“You mustn’t feel angry at us, Miss Gabrielle. It was to spare you, I’m sure, that Miss Flora has kept this secret all these years.”