[6]

He mounted gloomy, wide old stairs through whose enormous western windows a dim light was struggling. The treads were covered with a dark carpet strapped in brass rods. Gabrielle, as a baby, had loved the top-shaped ends of these rods, had stolen them, been detected, restored them, how many, many times!

The thought of her more than the thought of his old little self, of Tom and Sylvia, who were the real Flemings, after all, always came to him strangely when he first returned to the old house after any absence. Gabrielle, shouting, roaring, weeping, laughing, had roused more echoes in Wastewater than all the rest of them put together; she roused more echoes now, poor little Gabrielle!

Poor Gabrielle, and poor Tom! mused David. Life had dealt oddly with both these long-ago, eager, happy children, as Life seemed to have a fashion of dealing with the children of so strange and silent, so haunted and mysterious an old house. The shadow of the house, as real upon his spirit as was the actual shadow of the autumn twilight upon these stained old walls, shut heavily upon David as he crossed the upper hallways and turned the knob of the sitting-room door.

His aunt, in the widow’s black she had worn for some eighteen years, was sitting erect in an upholstered armchair by the fire. She turned to glance toward him as[7] he came in and welcomed him with a lifeless cheek to kiss and with the warmest smile her face ever knew.

[7]

It was not very warm; Flora Fleming had the black colouring of the clan; her look was always heavy, almost forbidding. She was in the middle fifties now; there was a heavy threading of gray in her looped, oily dark hair. Her skin was dark and the rough heavy eyebrows almost met above her sharply watchful eyes. There were black hairs at the corners of her lips and against her ears below her temples; her eyes were set a shade too close together, her teeth were slightly yellowed, too prominent, and rested upon her bitten lower lip. She wore, as always, a decent handsome silk that seemed never old and never new; there was a heavy book in her knuckly, nervous hands, and David noted for the first time to-day a discoloured vein or two in her somewhat florid, long face.

“This is good of you, David,” she said, dispassionately, putting her glasses into her book and laying it aside.

“Didn’t wake you from a nap?” David said, glad to sit down after his brisk walk.

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