“But, Gay——” protested David, with the world falling to pieces about him. “Already?”
“Enough,” she answered, in a low voice, her beautiful hands busily straightening the little rocky, sandy frame of the pool, “to know that it is not vanity, and passion, and selfishness!” And she glanced at “Anna Karenina” again, as if their words were only of the book.
What she said was nothing. But there was a note of confession, of proud acknowledgment, in her tone that struck David to a numbed astonishment. Gay! This explained her silences—her depressions, her attitude toward his kindly brotherly offer of protection! The child was a woman.
“Gay, tell me,” he said, turning the knife in his heart. “Is it—a man?” he was going to ask. But as the absurd tenor of these words occurred to him, he slightly altered the question: “Is it a man I know, dear? Is it Frank du Spain?”
She gave him a quick level glance, flushed scarlet, and looked out across the shining sea. Cloud shadows were marking it with purple and brown, and there was a jade-green reef in the blue. Far off thunder rumbled; but in the hot still air about them there was no movement.
“No, it isn’t Frank. I don’t think you know him,” she answered, quietly, with her little-sisterly smile.
David was too thoroughly shaken and dazed to answer. He sat, in a sort of sickness, trying to assimilate this new and amazing and most disquieting truth. Here was a new element to fit in among all the others—the child, the little tawny-headed girl of the family, cared for some unknown man. An unreasoning hate for this man stirred in David; he visualized a small and bowing Frenchman, titled perhaps, captivating to these innocent, convent-bred eyes.
“And will there be a happy ending?” he asked.
The girl seemed suddenly to have gained self-possession and her old serene spirit. She was smiling as she said:
“No. I think he likes another woman better than he likes me.”