good-humouredly. “But it might seem a little warmer welcome. I’ll go in to Crowchester for her, at least. After all, we’ve not seen her for years—for more than two years! When I was in Paris—when Jim Rucker and I were on our way to Spain—it was midsummer, and she and some of the other girls and nuns were in Normandy. I shall be glad to see her again.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Fleming, slowly, “that I could say as much. But her return brings it all up again, David. I shall do all I can for her, try my best to place her well. But when I think of my delicate little sister,” Flora rushed on, in a voice suddenly shaking, “and of her giving her life for this unwelcome child—the old bitterness rises up in me——!”

She stopped as if she were choking, and with set lips and inflated nostrils sat breathing quickly and looking into the fire, shaken by the painful agitation of a passion usually suppressed.

“I know. I know,” David, who came nearer than any one else in the world to intimacy with this woman, said soothingly. “But it wasn’t Gabrielle’s fault that poor little Aunt Lily made a stupid marriage with a—what was he? A travelling agent? Surely—surely, if you loved Aunt Lily, you can make up all the sorrow and shame of it to Gabrielle! There was—there was a marriage there, Aunt Flora?” David added, with a keen look up from his own finely shaped hands, now linked and hanging between his knees as he sat forward in his low chair.

[10]“Between Lily and Charpentier? Certainly!” she answered, sharply. And suspiciously she added: “What makes you ask that?”

[10]

“It has sometimes gone through my head that there might not have been—that that might account for her despair and her death,” David suggested. “Not that it matters much,” he added, more briskly. “What matters is that here we have Gabrielle, a young thing of eighteen, apparently all over her early frailness and delicateness—at least, I gather so?” he interrupted himself to ask, with another upward glance.

“The Superior writes that she is in perfect health.”

“Good. So here we have Gabrielle,” resumed David, “eighteen, finished off most satisfactorily by almost eight years with the good Sisters and with two post-graduate years in the Paris convent—discovered not to have a vocation——”

“Which I profoundly hoped she would have!” put in Flora, forcefully.

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