But Gay did not laugh.
“I do appreciate your taking my problems so much to heart, David,” she said, turning to pace staidly back through the twilight greenness and sweetness toward the house. “But I really blame myself a good deal for being such a baby! I’ve been selfishly dwelling upon my troubles, and acting as if no girl ever had them to face before, and of course it has worried you and Aunt Flora and Sylvia. But that’s over now, and I want you to know that I do appreciate your sympathy, and your having thought out this way of escape for me, and having planned it all with Sylvia.”
“As a matter of fact,” David interposed, eagerly, hoping that matters might yet adjust themselves, “Sylvia’s letter to me, asking to be set entirely free of any real or imaginary understanding between us, crossed my letter to her saying that I—had other plans in mind.”
He looked at Gabrielle hopefully with the words; perhaps when she knew how completely above-board and deliberated the step had been she would begin to see it in his light. But Gay merely reddened the more deeply, if that were possible, and said hastily and uncomfortably:
“I see. And I do thank you! And I ask you—I beg you—for the little time I am at Wastewater,” she added, feverishly, as the vertigo of shame and confusion that had been almost nauseating her threatened to engulf her in a humiliating burst of tears, “please never to say anything like this to me again! Please——! There are reasons——” Gay fought on desperately, feeling with terror that tears might end in his arms, and that utter capitulation on his own kindly humorous terms must follow such a break-down, “there are reasons why it kills me to have you talk so! I beg you, David, to consider it all settled—all over——”
“Why, of course I will!” David said, in a cold, quiet voice that braced her like a plunge into icy waters. “I’m only sorry to distress you,” he added, formally. “I had been thinking about it with a great deal of pleasure, and I thought you might. I’m sorry. We’ll never speak of it again.”
Then they were at the side door, and Gay escaped into the gloomy dark hallway, and fled red-cheeked and panting to her room, where she could cry, rage, shake herself, walk the floor, and analyse the whole situation unobserved.
“Oh, you fool!” she said, scornfully, to her panting image in the mirror. “You hysterical schoolgirl! Oh, how I hate him and his plans for me!” she gritted, through shut teeth. “And I hate Sylvia worse! I hate them all. He thought I would die of joy—he knows better now. Oh, insulting! He wouldn’t have done that to Sylvia or one of the Montallen girls! But it didn’t matter with me—Aunt Lily’s daughter, with no father to stand up for me. And it isn’t my fault I haven’t a father,” Gay said, pitifully, half aloud, leaning her elbows on the bureau, and beginning to cry into her hands; “it isn’t my fault that I’m all alone in the world!”
And again she flung herself on the bed, and her whole form was racked and shaken by the violence of her weeping.
“He’ll see my red eyes at dinner and think it’s for him,” she broke off, savagely, sitting up in the early dark and reaching for the scrambling and mystified puppy, who was going upon a whimpering tour of investigation among the pillows. Gay dried her eyes upon his downy little back, lighted her lamp, and soused her eyes with cold water. Half an hour later she went down to dinner, quite restored to calm and ready to take a cheerful part in the conversation. But she would not share the sitting room with her aunt and David after dinner.