“A nap?” She dismissed it with a quiet, not quite pleased smile. “Since when have I had that weakness?” she asked. “No. On an afternoon like this, with the leaves falling, one hears the wind about Wastewater if it blows nowhere else, and the sea. I can never nap in the afternoons. I hear—voices,” she finished, as if half to herself.

“Lord, one realizes how lonely the old place is, coming back to it!” David said, cheerfully.

“Not for me,” his aunt again corrected him in her quiet voice that seemed full of autumnal reveries and[8] the quiet falling of leaves itself. “Other places are lonely. Not this.”

[8]

“Well, it’s extremely nice to know that you feel so,” David pursued, resolutely combating the creeping quiet, the something that was almost depression, always ready to come out of musty corners and capture one here. “But when the girls are home we’ll have some young life at Wastewater, and then—when they marry, you’ll have to move yourself into brighter quarters—into a city apartment, perhaps!”

“When they marry?” she repeated, slightly stressing the pronoun.

“As I suppose they will?” David elucidated, looking up.

“They?”

“Sylvia—and Gabrielle, too!” he reminded her.

“Oh, Gabrielle?” She repeated the name quietly. “To be sure, she will marry,” she said, musingly. “But I can hardly feel that quite as much my affair as Sylvia’s future, David,” she finished, mildly.

“Daughter and niece!” David summarized it. “Sylvia rich and Gabrielle penniless, but both young and both our girls!”

“I can’t see it quite that way,” Mrs. Fleming said, thoughtfully, after a pause. “Gabrielle gets here to-night—you knew that?”

“That’s what brings me,” he answered. “I thought perhaps you would like me to meet her in Boston, bring her home?”

“I wired in answer to the Mother Superior’s wire,” Flora said, “that she was quite capable of making the journey herself. She should be here at about eight[9] to-night. She is eighteen, David. There is no necessity of making a child of her!”

[9]

“No,” he conceded, 

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