another year or two, David would muse, let her feel her wings. And then perhaps—perhaps they two would bring the Fleming line back to Wastewater.

The clock on the mantel struck an uncertain, silvery six. David looked at his watch in surprise: six o’clock. Gabrielle would be here in another two hours. Heavens, he said half aloud, stirring the fire and glancing over his shoulder at the deepened shadows of the ugly old room, how the wind howled about Wastewater in the autumn evenings, and how clearly one heard the gulls and the slash-slash of the sea!

Flora came in with a lamp; usually Hedda’s burden, but Hedda had gone downstairs, she explained; David rose. They were setting its familiar pink china globe carefully upon the crowded table when there was a stir outside in the upper hall, and the door opened, and a tall girl came quickly in, with a little nervous laughter in her greeting.

David had last seen Gabrielle at sixteen, when her teeth were strapped in a gold band and her young boyish figure still had a sort of gawky overgrownness about it. She had been convalescent after a fever when she had[26] sailed for France, then, and wearing big dark glasses on her bright eyes for fear of the glare of the sea, and had been plainly dressed in a heavy black coat and a school-girlish hat. She had been crying, too, emotional little Gabrielle; she had not altogether been a prepossessing little person, although David had always liked her and had given her a genuinely affectionate brotherly kiss for good-bye.

[26]

But that memory had not prepared him for this girl’s appearance; tired she undoubtedly was, train-rumpled, cold, and wind-blown, but she was oddly impressive for all that.

She enveloped Flora, who had stood wiping her oily hands on a barred tea towel, with a quick embrace and a kiss; then her eyes found David, and she held out both her hands.

“David! But how exactly as you were! And how like Uncle Roger!”

David had forgotten the husky voice, with a delicious touch of contralto roughness in it; he had forgotten nothing else, for this eager, graceful woman had about her little of the awkward, tear-stained child of more than two years before.

She was tall, perhaps not quite so tall as Sylvia, but very much more so than he had remembered her. Her hair, tawny, thick, spraying into fine tendrils on her forehead in the old way, hardly 

 Prev. P 17/230 next