It was quite true that the thought had come to her suddenly, for at the actual commencement of the sentence she had had no distinct suspicion in the matter. Forlornly, she had been instinctively searching for some phrase that should win David’s sympathy, that should help him to realize how lonely and sad she felt.
But now the vague sorrow in her heart, the indefinable weight upon her spirit, seemed to crystallize into these words, and almost frightened of herself when she had said them, she ended on a note of interrogation, and turned toward David for his denial.
There was a revulsion almost nauseating in its violence upon her when David only looked at her with infinite pity and concern, and asked:
“Gay, my dear, dear Gay, why do you say that?”
“Oh, my God, my God, my God!” Gay exclaimed, suffocating. And she got to her feet and walked to the embrasure of the big eastern bay window, where she stood staring blindly out at the paths white with shabby snow and the trees’ bare wet branches twinkling in the sunlight. A passionate childish wish that she had never voiced this horrible thought and so made it concrete in his consciousness and hers shook her from head to foot. It was said—it was said—and now they must say more!
The fire in the stove had burned itself out; a chill was beginning to pervade the gloomy great spaces of the dining room. The ugliest hour of a cold, glaring winter afternoon lay upon the bare garden; through the denuded shrubs they could see the steely ripple of the sea.
“You see that explains it all, David,” Gay said, hurriedly and briefly. “Aunt Flora’s anger against my mother, and her anxiety to keep the knowledge of her marriage from everyone. There was no marriage——”
“That is a thing you could easily find out, Gay,” David reminded her, watching her anxiously.
“Could find out?” There was a glint of hope in her voice, and in the heavy, beautiful eyes she raised to his. “Do you mean that you don’t know?”
“I think of course your mother was married!” David said, stoutly. “But how can I convince you? I never gave it a moment’s thought before. Or if I did,” he added, conscientiously, remembering vaguely some talk before the fire with Aunt Flora, on the day that Gay had come home last fall, “I must have been entirely reassured, for I never understand that there was anything irregular about it at all.”