Gabrielle, listening soberly, nodded with a sigh. She could not pretend to grieve. More, she could not pretend that it would not be a great lightening of her load when that frail little babbling personality was no more. She thirsted to get away from Wastewater, away from ghosts and shadows and echoes, into the world again! Away from David, with his kind eyes and his interested smile, away from Sylvia, who was so cruelly armed at all points with beauty and intelligence, with friends and money and position and power!
Presently Flora spoke of Sylvia; David would be home in a few days now, and Sylvia in less than five weeks. It would be so wonderful to have Sylvia home for always.
“Do you know, Gabrielle,” said Flora, jerking her yarn composedly over Ben’s little sleeping head, “I would not be intensely surprised if nothing came of the understanding between David and Sylvia. From something she wrote me, I rather suspect that there is somebody—— No, I can’t say that. Perhaps it is only that she does not want to think of anything so serious so soon. She’s not yet twenty-one, after all. But she wrote me as if she might be thinking it wiser for David——”
Gabrielle heard no more. Her throat constricted again, and her hands grew cold. All the fears of the afternoon returned in full force. But surely—surely they couldn’t all be so simple as to think that she would placidly and gratefully accept this solution of her problem, her poverty, her namelessness, her superfluousness!
David would not, anyway, she told herself a hundred times in the days to come. David was understanding, David was everything that was kind and good. He would help her find her independence, he would always be her friend, and Gay knew, in her own secret heart, that her universe would always revolve about him, that there would always be a mysterious potency in the mere sound of his voice, or touch of his hand, where she was concerned.
But discuss her with Sylvia and Aunt Flora, and kindly and with big-brotherly superiority offer her a “plan,” a plan to accept his name and his protection, simply because she was so apparently incapable of taking care of herself! Gabrielle suffocated at the thought. No, David couldn’t be David and do that.
In the ten days that elapsed before his arrival at Wastewater she alternated between such violent extremes of feeling, and lay awake pondering, imagining, and analyzing the situation so constantly at night that she was genuinely exhausted when the afternoon of his coming came at last.
There were moments when she felt she could not see him, dared not face him. There were times when she longed for his arrival, and to assure herself with a first glance that all this nervous anticipation was her own ridiculous imagining, and that no thought of it had ever crossed his mind!
When he finally came Gay was in the garden. For spring had come to Wastewater, and David’s fancy of finding her before a fire in the sitting room had been outdated by two full weeks of sunshine. There was fresh green grass sprouting about the old wall, there were daisy-starred stretches of it under the massed blossoms of the fruit trees; gracious shadows lay long and sweet everywhere over new green leaves; the willows were jade fountains of foliage, the maples uncurling moist little red and gold tendrils, and the lilacs were rustling columns of clean new leafage and plumy blossom. The last of the frost had melted from the newly turned sods; gulls were walking about, pulling at worms, and spring sunset lay over the broad, gently heaving surface of an opal sea.
David had taken his bags upstairs, greeted his aunt, who was knitting in the sitting room, but without the fire, and had spent perhaps ten restless and excited minutes in outward conversation and in inner excitement. Where was Gay? When would the door handle turn and the plainly gowned girl come in, with the smile flashing into her star-sapphire eyes when she saw him, and the beautiful hand she extended so quaintly, so demurely enhanced by the transparent white cuff? David was so shaken by a strange emotion at the thought that every moment was bringing their meeting closer, so confused by the undercurrent of his thoughts—the undercurrent that would dwell upon her greeting, and his introduction of all he had to say to her—that he could hardly hear what his aunt was saying. When he did finally escape to search for Gay, and when Hedda told him that she was in the garden, he found himself standing quite still in the side passage, with his heart thundering, and his senses swimming, and an actual unwillingness upon him, after all these waiting days and weeks, to make real the dream that he had cherished so long.