“I asked you: did Margret say anything about medicines?”
“I—I—you mean on Sunday——?”
“No,” Gay would say, astonished at his manner. “I mean this morning, five minutes ago.”
“Oh, I see—I see! Did—who? What?”
“Never mind. I’ll ask her,” Gay would finish, deciding that David must be absolutely absorbed in the picture he was painting. David would watch her go from the room, gracious, sweet, beautiful in her cotton gown. All the spring seemed only a setting for her loveliness, the lilacs and the blue sky, the sunshine and the drifting snow of fruit blossoms.
It was this wonderful, this incomparable woman, he would remind himself scathingly, that he had affronted with his insultingly casual offer of marriage a week ago. No wonder the girl had put a definite distance between them since! But he knew he would ask her again, simply because there was no other conceivable thing for him to do.
His dream of the little farmhouse in Keyport returned now, but it was a dream infinitely enhanced, and haloed by all the colours of the rainbow. David could hardly bear the poignant sweetness of the thought of Gay as his wife; Gay perhaps chatting over a late breakfast on the porch with him; Gay travelling with him, and looking over a steamer rail as the blue mountains of Sicily or the green shores of the Isle of Wight slowly formed themselves on the horizon. Once, when he was quietly painting, the thought of Gay with a child in her arms came to him suddenly, and David felt his eyes sting and the palms of his hands suddenly moist.
She was leagues away from him now, never with him when she could avoid it, never alone with him at all. She was apparently living a life of her own, coming and going gently and pleasantly, answering, listening, but no longer the Gabrielle he had known a few months ago.
And ten days after his return she was still further removed by her mother’s death. Lily died quite peacefully one sweet May evening, after an afternoon when she had seemed more normal than for years. She had had for some days the idea that Gabrielle was her old nurse, Miss Rosecrans, and made all her few demands of the girl under that name. But at the very end, when Gabrielle was kneeling beside her, with sorrowful, tear-brimmed eyes fixed upon the yellowed little sunken face, Lily opened her eyes, fixed them affectionately upon Flora, and asked feebly:
“Is this big girl my baby, Flo?”