How bewildered she would look; he could see that faintly smiling, maternally indulgent look——!
His dream took complete possession of David, and made everything he did and said in these days seem unreal. The exhibition was under-run by a strong current of it: “It involves you and me, Gay, and my having a talk with Sylvia,” David was saying to himself over and over, and the sale of a picture only made him think suddenly that he would like to give her a little present. Oh, and he had his mother’s beautiful old-fashioned diamond engagement ring, and also some almost valueless but pretty topazes that had been hers, a ring and earrings and a chain, and an oval onyx pin with a pearl in it. These would be charming with Gay’s warm golden colouring—especially if she wore those plain little velvet frocks——
Life took on quite a new meaning for David, and he said to himself that it must be because he was moving in this matter with Gay’s safety and comfort and future rather than his own predominant in his mind, that this odd fluttering happiness, this poignant interest in the tiniest things in his day—because oddly they all seemed connected with his dream—this new delightful sense of values in anything and everything, had come to him.
Spring was always late at Wastewater, but spring was surely here, he thought, when he reached the old place late in an afternoon early in May.
He had hoped to get to Wastewater in the middle of, or at least by the third week in April, but upon returning to New York he found business matters of Sylvia’s there which could not wait. It was with a grim little twitch in the corner of his mouth that David devoted himself to them. Sylvia would pay her next administrator; and it would not be her affectionate cousin David!
Now he would not get to Wastewater until May, and the twenty-third of April was Gay’s birthday! David felt quite disproportionately provoked by the delay. Poor little Gay, she would not have much fun on her nineteenth anniversary. And because it seemed so newly and delightfully his business to think of Gay’s pleasure now before his own, he sent her a birthday letter.
David wrote, with something less than the truth:
I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and hoping that, between us all this summer, we can lighten that sad heart of yours. Or no, I won’t say “us,” for I hope to do something toward it all by myself. I’ve got a most attractive plan to propose to you, and you must make up your mind to agree to it. I’m writing Sylvia about it, for she comes into it a little—but not much. It is almost entirely dependent upon you, and somewhat upon yours ever faithfully and affectionately,
David.
She would get nothing from that, David assured himself as he mailed the letter. Having done so he tried to think just why the thrilling excitement that possessed him had seemed to exact that he relieve his overcharged emotions with just so much of a hint. It would only puzzle her——