“I can ask,” Gay mused, sombrely.
“I would ask, if I were you!” David answered, with a quick nod. “Only remembering,” he added, “that if it should be what you fear, it does not really touch you, Gay. You are not yet nineteen, and you are sure to win friends, and your own place, and create your own life and your own happiness, in these years that are ahead. Don’t feel anything but pity, if this should be the case.”
She glanced at him gravely over her shoulder. Then he saw the blood creep up under her clear, warmly colourless skin.
“I would like to have something—one thing!—in my life,” she said, slowly, “of which I might be proud!”
David watched her as she walked slowly, and with her head held high in a sort of weary dignity, from the room.
Flora, before the sitting-room fire later, told him that the girl had been upstairs with poor Lily, who was in the drowsy state that followed fatigue and the rather strong astringent medicine that Margret had given her for a heavy cold. Gabrielle had sat beside her mother’s fire, peacefully reading, Flora reported. Flora herself seemed oddly relieved and at ease about the matter.
Gabrielle came into the room just before dinner, with her eyes still clouded and heavy, but wearing the prettiest of her plain black uniforms, with the white collar and cuffs that enhanced the delicate beauty of her wrists and throat. She seemed composed but subdued, and was so extraordinarily lovely, sitting silent in her chair after dinner, raising her long curved lashes to look seriously at whoever addressed her, that David thought that if anything could make Gay more beautiful than before, this touch of tragedy and sorrow had done so. To-night she seemed to have no heart for cards, and David dared not suggest them; once, when Aunt Flora had left the room, she told him in a hurried phrase, and with the hot colour burning in her cheeks, that at the first opportunity she meant to question her aunt and clear up the whole matter.
“I think you’re wise!” David said, warmly. “And meanwhile, would it do any good to have me stay at Wastewater? Are you in the least nervous about being left here?”
“Left here? With Margret and Daisy and Sarah and Hedda and Trude and Aunt Flora?” she queried, looking up with the shadow of a sad smile. “My dear David,” she added, as if half to herself, staring back at the fire again, “what I have to fear is nothing from which you can save me!”
“Sad times come into every life, Gay,” the man said, trying to comfort her. “I remember,” he blundered on, “I remember the day Tom and I were brought home from school—when our mother died. That was before you were born, or Sylvia was born. Aunt Flora wasn’t even married, if I remember rightly—no, of course she wasn’t. For she was engaged to Uncle Roger after that——”