“She’ll come over to see me, or I’ll go into Keyport and find her,” Gabrielle promised. “Ah,” she said, on a long sigh, departing, “it’s so good to be home!”

The door shut behind her; there was utter silence in the room. Flora, who usually had her knitting at this[30] time, sat back with leaden, closed eyes; David glanced at her, looked back at the fire.

[30]

“Is she like what you expected?” David asked.

“She’s like nothing—nobody,” Flora answered, in a low tone.

“She’s handsome!” David offered. “Poor child!”

Flora made no answer. She opened her eyes, and began to knit, flinging the granite-gray yarn free with little flying jerks. David was mending the fire when Hedda came stolidly in to announce dinner.

Gabrielle joined them on the way downstairs; David smiled at her.

“Seems strange to be home?”

“It seems,” she said, “as if I had never been away! The old rooms, the old things, this old good feeling of the first autumn cold in the house—and that loud sound of the sea——”

Meals at Wastewater nowadays were tedious and formal affairs. The dining room was large and draughty, and the candles lighted on the side tables wavered in the cool autumn evening. There were great bay windows on the north and east walls; the latter sometimes caught the clean sweet light of sunrise, but almost all the year through it was a dreary room even in the daytime. These bays were now shut off in heavy rep curtains, with tassels and ropes; the walls were covered with a heavy old pressed paper in chocolate and gold; the floor, outside the “body-Brussels” rug, shone slippery and dark. In one corner, cunningly concealed in paper and wainscoting, was the door into the enormous, inconvenient pantry; the kitchen and storerooms were downstairs, and in pauses in the meal the diners[31] could hear the creaking of the dumb-waiter ropes and the maids’ anxious voices echoing in the shaft.

[31]

There was a great rubber plant in one corner, heavy walnut sideboards, and a great mirror over the black-and-white marble mantel that seemed to make the room darker and more gloomy. On the mantel was another heavy bronze-and-marble clock, this one under a clear tall bubble of glass ringed by a chenille cord. On each side of the clock stood 

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