CHAPTER II
OF LOVE BUT NOT OF MARRIAGE
I
"You'll stay to dinner?" she asked, as they went down to the drawing-room together a little later on. It was very warm and snug there, and the deep red shades upon the lamps appeared to him particularly English. They had few such suggestions of home in his country.
"Why," he rejoined, "if it will not be putting you out."
"We have some pea soup and a sole. My father is Popish enough to eat little meat, but that is for his stomach's sake—as Timothy was to drink wine. Of course, the baby cannot eat anything at all. Did you think very badly of her, I wonder? Is she really as ill as the doctors make out?"
"Tell me how ill the doctors make her out, and I'll say what I think. Anyway, it isn't pneumonia yet. I've seen too much of it to be scared by that particular spook. She's a bit of congestion of the lungs, and she's worrying herself into a fever. The rest's doctor's talk—what they take a fee to say."
She smiled, and went on busying herself about the room. The fire light showed all her height and the fine contour of well-developed limbs. Every movement was full of grace, he said. Gabrielle Silvester could have taken her place in any society in Europe. For an instant, he thought of her as the bejewelled hostess of a Fifth Avenue mansion, and that thought returned later on.
"It is good to hear you," she said with a light laugh. "Everyone who comes to a sick house seems to think it necessary to speak in a morbid whisper. They expect to look sorrow in the face on the doorstep. Of course, she has been very ill—dangerously ill, I think. Our bringing her to England was a very great mistake; even father knows that now."
"Then she isn't very happy here?"