“This is Gabrielle, Lily,” Flora said, clearing her throat.
Lily smiled with ineffable satisfaction at Gabrielle, and said contentedly:
“Gabrielle. Isn’t it a pretty name? Do you like it? Did Roger like it?”
“I am going to say some prayers, Mother,” Gabrielle said, smiling with wet cheeks, and with the salt taste of her own tears in her mouth. Lily opened her eyes briefly, for the last time.
“Ah, I wish you would!” she said, with a smile and a deep sigh. And she never moved or spoke again.
Two days later she was buried in the little plot within Wastewater’s wide walls; the doctor, Flora weeping on David’s arm, Gay standing straight and alone, and the awestruck maids were all her little funeral train. It was Flora who seemed to feel the loss most, and with surprising force; she seemed broken and aged, and it was for Gabrielle to comfort her.
“I never supposed it would be so,” Flora repeated, over and over. “That I would be the last—that Will and Roger and Lily would all be gone before me!”
She would not stay in bed; Flora did not belong to the generation that can eat and read and idle comfortably under covers. She was up at her usual hour upon every one of the sweet, warm fragrant mornings, when dawn crept in across the sea and the wet garden sent up a very bouquet of perfumes through the open upstairs windows. But she was silent and sad, and when Sylvia’s long-awaited happy Commencement came, Flora was really too ill to go, although she refused to concede to herself the luxury even of one hour upon a couch, or the satisfaction of a single visit from the doctor. David went up alone to the Commencement, and brought Sylvia back with him. It was on that last day of her college life, a day of flowers and white gowns, crowds, music, laughter, and tears, that Sylvia found time to say to him pleadingly:
“David dear, my letter didn’t hurt you terribly?”
“I’d had something of the same feeling myself, you know,” he reminded her. “Our letters crossed. You remember I said just what you did, that it must either be an engagement or nothing, and that I knew you would prefer it to be nothing just at this time.”