He plunged, the next morning, into work, going off to Keyport
immediately after breakfast and returning late in the afternoon. The
day was exquisite beyond words, the sea satiny blue, and there was
real summer warmth in the sweet spring stillness of the air. David saw
Gabrielle in the garden when he came back, and took his painting gear
upstairs, determined not to make himself ridiculous in her eyes again.
But a power stronger than himself immediately took him downstairs
again. He walked, with an air of strolling, to the hollies, where she
had been. But she was gone.
David now felt irrationally and without analysis that he must see her,
and at once. He had nothing to say to her, and if he had, he might have
waited until dinner-time brought them together. But he felt like a
lost child, not seeing that figure in blue gingham--his eyes searched
for it hungrily, swept each new vista; he felt actually sick with
disappointment when moment after moment went by and there was no sign
of her down the lane, on the cliff road, or among the rocks. He thought
of nothing but the finding of her; Gabrielle in her blue gingham seated
by a pool, running along with Ben--just to find her----
She came into the sitting room just before dinner, and David, who was
actually exhausted from the monotonous hammering of thoughts about only
her, dared not trust himself to look up as she slipped into her chair.
He was glancing over a new _Atlantic_; he pretended that he had not
heard Gay enter.
“It was young Doctor Ensicoe, the son,” said Gabrielle’s voice,
suddenly, quietly in the silence, to Aunt Flora. “I took him upstairs.
He says to watch, and let his father know if there seems to be any pain
or restlessness.”
If the words had been so many bombs they could scarcely have had a more
extraordinary effect upon David. He felt as if his heart had given a
great plunge, stopped short, raced on again madly; he felt as if his
mouth and throat were dry, a sort of weakness and vertigo that were yet
exquisitely pleasant seized him.
It was impossible for him to speak to this girl, or to look up, while
this state of affairs lasted. If she saw that he was nervous and unlike
himself, she must think what she would----! David could only try to get
a grip upon soul and body, and betray himself as little as possible.
This moment was the end of all peace for him. For although he
did indeed presently hand his aunt the magazine with some brief
comment, and although dinner and the evening proceeded as usual, he
was beginning to suspect that his whole life had been changed now,
mysteriously changed--partly perhaps his own doing, through that
long-cherished dream of an imaginary scene with an imaginary Gabrielle.
But no matter how it had come about. The blazing and inescapable truth
was that there was nothing else in the world for him but this quiet,
slender, serious, tawny-headed girl. He did not know what he felt
toward her, or whether the wild confusion of his senses might be called
anything so reasonable as feeling; she was simply in the world, she was
sitting in chairs, opening doors, speaking in that incredibly thrilling
voice, raising those extraordinary eyes--that was enough.
David had never before been really in love. But he had thought he
loved Sylvia, and he did not put in that same category his feeling for
Gabrielle. This was nothing that could be classified or regulated;
regulate it, indeed, David thought, with an almost audible groan when
he came to this word in his thoughts; as well regulate raging flames or
rushing waters!
It devoured him with fever. He was unable to eat for excitement, never
happy one instant out of Gabrielle’s company, acutely miserable when in
it. He lay awake in the warm spring nights thinking of what he had said
to her during the past day, and as her looks and words in reply--such
quiet words, such rare looks!--came back before his vision, he would
feel his heart stop, and his breath would fail him with sheer fear and
terror and hope and agony of doubt.
He sat at breakfast, pushing about the toast that was so much chalk and
plaster to his palate, scalding himself with his coffee one morning,
forgetting it entirely the next. His eyes never left Gabrielle. She
would glance up, passing him perhaps the omelette that he would not
even see, much less taste, and at his awkward laugh, muttered words,
and hastily averted look she would perhaps colour confusedly. If she
directed a simple question to him, he found it maddeningly difficult to
answer.
“I beg pardon----?” He had to leave the sentence hanging rawly. He
could not say her name.
“I asked you: did Margret say anything about medicines?”
“I--I--you mean on Sunday----?”
“No,” Gay would say, astonished at his manner. “I mean this morning,
five minutes ago.”
“Oh, I see--I see! Did--who? What?”
“Never mind. I’ll ask her,” Gay would finish, deciding that David must
be absolutely absorbed in the picture he was painting. David would
watch her go from the room, gracious, sweet, beautiful in her cotton
gown. All the spring seemed only a setting for her loveliness, the
lilacs and the blue sky, the sunshine and the drifting snow of fruit
blossoms.
It was this wonderful, this incomparable woman, he would remind himself
scathingly, that he had affronted with his insultingly casual offer of
marriage a week ago. No wonder the girl had put a definite distance
between them since! But he knew he would ask her again, simply because
there was no other conceivable thing for him to do.
His dream of the little farmhouse in Keyport returned now, but it was
a dream infinitely enhanced, and haloed by all the colours of the
rainbow. David could hardly bear the poignant sweetness of the thought
of Gay as his wife; Gay perhaps chatting over a late breakfast on the
porch with him; Gay travelling with him, and looking over a steamer
rail as the blue mountains of Sicily or the green shores of the Isle
of Wight slowly formed themselves on the horizon. Once, when he was
quietly painting, the thought of Gay with a child in her arms came to
him suddenly, and David felt his eyes sting and the palms of his hands
suddenly moist.
She was leagues away from him now, never with him when she could avoid
it, never alone with him at all. She was apparently living a life of
her own, coming and going gently and pleasantly, answering, listening,
but no longer the Gabrielle he had known a few months ago.
And ten days after his return she was still further removed by her
mother’s death. Lily died quite peacefully one sweet May evening,
after an afternoon when she had seemed more normal than for years. She
had had for some days the idea that Gabrielle was her old nurse, Miss
Rosecrans, and made all her few demands of the girl under that name.
But at the very end, when Gabrielle was kneeling beside her, with
sorrowful, tear-brimmed eyes fixed upon the yellowed little sunken
face, Lily opened her eyes, fixed them affectionately upon Flora, and
asked feebly:
“Is this big girl my baby, Flo?”
“This is Gabrielle, Lily,” Flora said, clearing her throat.
Lily smiled with ineffable satisfaction at Gabrielle, and said
contentedly:
“Gabrielle. Isn’t it a pretty name? Do you like it? Did Roger like it?”
“I am going to say some prayers, Mother,” Gabrielle said, smiling with
wet cheeks, and with the salt taste of her own tears in her mouth. Lily
opened her eyes briefly, for the last time.
“Ah, I wish you would!” she said, with a smile and a deep sigh. And she
never moved or spoke again.
Two days later she was buried in the little plot within Wastewater’s
wide walls; the doctor, Flora weeping on David’s arm, Gay standing
straight and alone, and the awestruck maids were all her little
funeral train. It was Flora who seemed to feel the loss most, and with
surprising force; she seemed broken and aged, and it was for Gabrielle
to comfort her.
“I never supposed it would be so,” Flora repeated, over and over. “That
I would be the last--that Will and Roger and Lily would all be gone
before me!”
She would not stay in bed; Flora did not belong to the generation that
can eat and read and idle comfortably under covers. She was up at her
usual hour upon every one of the sweet, warm fragrant mornings, when
dawn crept in across the sea and the wet garden sent up a very bouquet
of perfumes through the open upstairs windows. But she was silent and
sad, and when Sylvia’s long-awaited happy Commencement came, Flora was
really too ill to go, although she refused to concede to herself the
luxury even of one hour upon a couch, or the satisfaction of a single
visit from the doctor. David went up alone to the Commencement, and
brought Sylvia back with him. It was on that last day of her college
life, a day of flowers and white gowns, crowds, music, laughter, and
tears, that Sylvia found time to say to him pleadingly:
“David dear, my letter didn’t hurt you terribly?”
“I’d had something of the same feeling myself, you know,” he reminded
her. “Our letters crossed. You remember I said just what you did, that
it must either be an engagement or nothing, and that I knew you would
prefer it to be nothing just at this time.”
“Oh, yes!” responded Sylvia, narrowing her eyes, and speaking a little
vaguely. And David saw that while her letter, a letter written in a
charmingly frank fashion, and asking please--please to be free from
any engagement to him for a little while, had made a romantic sort
of impression upon her mind, his had scarcely registered upon her
consciousness at all. In other words, Sylvia was her own whole world
just at the moment, and the only things that mattered were her own
moods, her own ideas, her own individual desires.
The highly distinguished and honourable conclusion of her school days,
her youth, her beauty, her sense of closely impending power could not
but be deliciously stimulating to a nature like Sylvia’s. She and
David stopped two nights in Boston, Sylvia with a schoolmate, David
at a hotel, met on the languid, warm spring mornings to explore the
quiet shops and to discuss various plans for Wastewater: electric
lighting for Wastewater, a furnace for Wastewater, a hot-water system
for Wastewater. There was a delightful new, red, slim checkbook;
there was an imposing balance at the bank. Sylvia bought herself one
or two charming frocks as a sort of promissory note of the financial
independence that was so soon to be, and she did not forget a broad
lacy black hat for dear little Gabrielle, who had had such a sad year,
and a lacy thin black afternoon gown to match it.
Gabrielle, when they reached Wastewater, met them all in white, and
Sylvia gave her a warm kiss and murmured just the right phrase of
sympathy as they went upstairs to find her mother. The gardens were
exquisite in early June bloom; the whole house smelled of roses and
summer weather; birds were flashing in and out of the cherry trees;
John was on his knees beside the strawberry bed.
But Flora sat upstairs before the cold grate, with the windows shut,
and her first words to Sylvia were broken by tears. Sylvia comforted
her with a sort of loving impatience in her voice.
“Mamma, darling! Is this reasonable! Isn’t it after all a blessed
solution for poor little Aunt Lily?”
“But I never thought it would be so!” Flora faltered, blowing her nose,
sniffling, straightening her glasses with all the unlovely awkwardness
of hard-fought grief. And immediately she regained her composure,
almost with a sort of shame, and David could say truthfully to Sylvia a
little later, when the three young persons were wandering through the
garden, that Sylvia had done her mother good already.
Sylvia indeed did them all good; she was delighted with everything,
appreciative and pleasant with the maids, and sisterly in her manner
toward Gabrielle. David found her sensible and clever in the business
conferences they had on the dreamy summer mornings in the little
office downstairs, where perhaps the first mistress of Wastewater had
transacted her business also, more than a hundred years before--the
business of superintending stores and soap-making, weaving and
dyeing, bartering in cocks and geese and the selling of lambs. Sylvia
waived all unnecessary matters, was brightly receptive, and in every
way businesslike and yet confident in David’s judgment. Later she
would debate with John about fruit, with Trude about preserving,
with Daisy about tablecloths, all in her own pleasantly unhesitating
yet considerate manner. It was evident that she would assume her
responsibilities thoroughly, yet with no jarring and disrupting of the
accustomed course of things.
In one of the late evenings when Sylvia came into Gay’s room to brush
her hair and to gossip, Gay broached her plan of going to a Boston
convent as soon as the hot weather should be over, to look about her
and find some sort of work. Sylvia listened thoughtfully and looked up
with a kindly smile.
“You’d be happier so, Gabrielle?”
“I think so,” Gay answered.
“What is it?” Sylvia questioned, kindly. “Wastewater too lonely?”
Gabrielle did not answer immediately, except by a quick shake of her
head. Presently she said, a little thickly:
“No, I love Wastewater more than any other place in the world.”
“Well,” said Sylvia, musing, “if you must try your wings, by all means
try them! Be sure we’ll all be interested in making it a success, Gay.
Mamma and I may go abroad in the fall--it isn’t definite, of course,
but I think she would like it, if all my various anchors here can be
managed without me.”
Gabrielle had been burning, fearing, hating to ask it; she found
herself saying now, with a little unconquerable incoherence:
“Then you and David----?”
“David and I,” answered Sylvia, with a quick, mysterious smile, “are
quite the best friends in the world!”
Did she know? David, in asking her to free him, had told her how much?
Gay looked at her cousin through the mirror, and her face blazed.
But Sylvia, curling the end of her long braid thoughtfully about her
finger, was unsuspicious. Gay wondered if she could be acting.
“I don’t mind telling you, dear,” said Sylvia, presently, “that I wrote
David in the spring, feeling that our understanding was an injustice
to us both, and asked him to be just my good friend--my best friend,”
Sylvia interrupted herself to say, with a little emotion, “for to me
he is the finest man in the world!--for a little while longer. And as
he has been my obedient knight ever since I was a little curly-headed
despot in short frocks, of course he obeyed me,” she ended, with a
little whimsical glance and smile. And now, having gotten to her feet,
and come over to the mirror, she laid one arm affectionately about
Gabrielle’s shoulder. “I love that bright thick hair of yours,” Sylvia
said.
Suddenly Gabrielle felt young, crude, hateful because she did not adore
Sylvia, contemptible because she suffered in seeing that this other
girl’s position and happy destiny it was to be always admired, always
superb. Why couldn’t she--why couldn’t she school herself to think of
Sylvia as rich and beautiful and adored, and married to David, and
mistress of Wastewater? Weren’t there other men, other fortunes, other
friends to be won? Gay laid Sylvia’s smooth hand against her cheek, and
said like a penitent child:
“You’re awfully good! I _am_ grateful to you.”
“That’s right!” Sylvia said, laughing. And she went upon her serene
way, to brush her teeth and open her windows and jump into bed with her
book of essays, always adequate and always sweet.
Gabrielle determined, as she usually determined at night, to begin
again to-morrow, to force herself to meet Sylvia’s friendship and
affection, David’s friendship and affection, with what was only, after
all, a normal, natural response. Why must she tremble, suspect, watch,
turn red and turn white in this maddening and idiotic manner, when
these two older and infinitely superior persons only wanted her to be
pleasant, natural, friendly, as they were? The younger girl felt as if
she were living over a powder magazine; at David’s most casual word her
throat would thicken, and her words become either incredibly foolish
or stupidly heavy; and when he and Sylvia were together and out of her
hearing, her soul and mind were in a tumult beside which actual bodily
pain would have been a relief.
When they cheerfully asked her to join them on their way down for an
afternoon of idling or reading on the shore, Gay put herself--as she
furiously felt--in a ridiculous position by gruffly refusing. The two,
and Aunt Flora, spectacled and armed with a book, would look at her in
astonishment.
“Oh, if Aunt Flora’s going----” Gay might stammer, in her embarrassment
using the very phrase she meant not to use. And Sylvia’s pretty mouth
would twitch at the corners, and she would exchange a demure look with
David, as if to say--Gabrielle fancied--“Isn’t she a deliciously gauche
little creature? She is trying to clear the tracks for our affair!”
If, on the other hand, Gabrielle came innocently from half an hour
among the sweet warmth and flying colour and the buzzing of bees about
the sweet-pea vines, to meet David and Sylvia in the path, she might
hear Sylvia say lightly and good-temperedly--and might lie awake in
the nights remembering it with a thumping heart and cheeks hot with
shame!--“Not now, David. We can discuss this later!”
On a certain burning July day, several weeks after Sylvia’s homecoming,
all four Flemings had planned to drive into Crowchester in the new car,
for some shopping. Sylvia’s birthday was but a week ahead, and she was
to have a house party for the event. To-day she had a neat list: gimp,
enamel, candles, glue, lemonade glasses, Japanese lanterns? (with a
question mark) and charcoal? (with another). For there were to be a
beach picnic and a garden fête next week.
Just before they started, however, Gay begged to be excused. She
was feeling the heat of the day, she said, and wanted to spend
the afternoon quietly down on the shore with her Italian grammar.
Instantly, without premeditation, David felt himself growing excited
again--here was his chance at last for a talk alone with her; a chance
that the last few weeks had not afforded him before. The sudden hope of
it put him almost into a betraying confusion of excuses; but Sylvia,
dismissing him amiably, fancied she knew the cause--and an entirely
different cause--of his defection.
For David was in no mood to dance attendance upon his pretty elder
cousin this particular afternoon. He had driven the new car down from
Boston the week before with real enjoyment; it was a beautiful car,
and David, who was not after all an experienced driver, was rather
proud of his safe handling of it. But since it had been at Wastewater
Sylvia had shown a strong preference for Walker’s driving. Walker was a
nice young fellow of perhaps nineteen, a newcomer, who was to act as
chauffeur and to help John with errands, and perhaps in September, when
the road was less used, to teach Sylvia to drive.
For some obscure reason it angered David to have to sit idle beside
the pleasantly youthful and amiable Walker and hear Sylvia’s clear-cut
directions. He would rather, he thought ungraciously, he would far
rather walk.
And to-day, when Gabrielle was graciously excused by Sylvia, he
determined to stay at home, too. Of course this might mean that Aunt
Flora would also stay, David reflected, to walk up and down above the
sea, leaning upon his arm in her new feebleness and sadness.
But for once Aunt Flora made no sign of abandoning the trip, and
although Sylvia looked at him steadily, she also offered no objections.
David could hardly believe that he was actually free, after these
crowded weeks, to walk after Gabrielle through the garden, with no
prospect of an immediate interruption.
His heart beat with a quite disproportionate emotion. If any one had
told David Fleming a few weeks ago that the chance to follow his lonely
little cousin down to the shore and to have a few minutes of talk alone
with her would have made his temples hammer and his breath come quick
with sheer emotion, he might have laughed.
But he was shaking to-day, and there was a drumming in his ears. Since
Sylvia’s return he had had no such opportunity for a talk. Gabrielle
was down in a favourite cranny of the great rocks; the blue tides
swelling at her feet. David saw her black hat first, flung down on
the strip of beach, then the slender white-shod feet, braced against
a boulder, and then the white figure, with the tawny head bent over a
book.
It was shady here, for this particular group of gray water-worn stones
faced east, and the cliff was at her back. But there was a soft shimmer
of light even in the shadow, and across the rocks above and behind her
head the reflected sunshine on the sea ran in little unceasing ripples
of brightness. She started as David came across the strand, and put her
hand to her heart with a quite simple gesture of surprise.
“David, I thought you went with Sylvia!”
“Too hot,” he answered, briefly, flinging himself down at her feet and
falling into contemplation of a weed-fringed pool that was patiently
awaiting the tide. The water brimmed it, and grasses opened and moved
mysteriously, showing exquisite colours as they spread. The ebb emptied
it again, and the ribbons of grass lay lifeless against the wet and
twinkling mosaic of life that coated the rocks. A steamer going by like
a toy boat on the blue water ten miles away sent out a mild little
plume of sound.
“‘_Mia sorella ha una casa_,’” David stated, with a careless glance at
the book. “I had three Italian lessons once, and I know that!”
Gabrielle laughed, a little fluttered laugh, and extended to him a
white hand and a stout volume, held title out.
“‘Anna Karenina,’” David read aloud, with a reproachful look. “Oh, you
Gay deceiver!”
He had sometimes called her that in her babyhood, years ago, and he
fancied there was a little softening shine, like a flurry of wind on
gray water, in her eyes when she heard it now. But she gave no other
sign.
“Is it the first time you have read it?” David asked, conventionally,
wondering where his dear, confident companion of the January days had
gone, and whether this new dignity and aloofness in Gabrielle were only
a passing effect of sorrow, and of the displeasure his most ill-chosen
words had given her, or whether he had dreamed that once she was ready
to flash, to respond, to be affectionate with him.
“Oh, no!” she answered. “But I have to read it over now and then like
‘Cranford’ and ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘The Ring and the Book.’”
“A lot you get out of ‘The Ring and the Book!’” David teased, with a
brotherly smile.
“I get what I can,” she answered, demurely, unprotesting, and with just
a hint of her old easy fun with him. It was enough to turn his heart to
water, and he formed within his confused mind a solemn resolution not
to fail her again, not to offend, to watch this timid little seedling
of returning confidence and friendship reverently and tenderly; to keep
that at least, if he might have no more.
“But Anna’s is a sad story,” he said, looking at the book.
“Yes, but I like sad stories,” Gabrielle answered, thoughtfully.
“Love stories. Don’t all girls like love stories?”
“I don’t call this love,” Gabrielle objected, after a brief silence,
when she had looked at the two words on the cover of the book until
they spun and quivered before her eyes.
“Come now,” David offered, mildly, actually trembling lest some misstep
on his part shatter the exquisite pleasure of this blue hour of summer,
and the ripple and quiver of the sea against the big shady rocks, and
the quiet beauty of the girl’s voice. “Don’t say that you think ‘Anna
Karenina’ isn’t a love story!”
“It isn’t my idea of love,” Gabrielle persisted, with a faint stress on
the personal pronoun.
“What would you call it?” David asked.
“Passion, egotism, selfishness,” the girl answered, unexpectedly and
quietly, not raising her eyes, and as if she were thinking aloud.
“Oh----? And do you get this out of books?”
“Get what?” Gabrielle asked, after a pause.
“Your knowledge of love, Gay.”
Again a silence. Her eyes did not meet his, but she did not seem
discomposed or agitated. She had gathered up a handful of white sand,
and now she let it sift slowly through her fingers into the hemmed
waters of the tide pool.
“Not entirely,” she answered, presently. And again the notes of her
husky sweet voice seemed to David to fall slowly through the air like
falling stars.
“I feel as if I had just begun to learn about it lately,” David said,
clearing his throat and beginning to tremble. And as she did not
answer, he told himself despairingly that he had again taken with her
the very tone of all tones that must be avoided. “You’ve never been in
love, Gabrielle?” he went on, desperately trying to lighten the tone
of the conversation, make it seem like an ordinary casual talk.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, quickly. And now he had a flash of
the star-sapphire eyes.
“But, Gay----” protested David, with the world falling to pieces about
him. “Already?”
“Enough,” she answered, in a low voice, her beautiful hands busily
straightening the little rocky, sandy frame of the pool, “to know that
it is not vanity, and passion, and selfishness!” And she glanced at
“Anna Karenina” again, as if their words were only of the book.
What she said was nothing. But there was a note of confession, of proud
acknowledgment, in her tone that struck David to a numbed astonishment.
Gay! This explained her silences--her depressions, her attitude toward
his kindly brotherly offer of protection! The child was a woman.
“Gay, tell me,” he said, turning the knife in his heart. “Is it--a
man?” he was going to ask. But as the absurd tenor of these words
occurred to him, he slightly altered the question: “Is it a man I know,
dear? Is it Frank du Spain?”
She gave him a quick level glance, flushed scarlet, and looked out
across the shining sea. Cloud shadows were marking it with purple and
brown, and there was a jade-green reef in the blue. Far off thunder
rumbled; but in the hot still air about them there was no movement.
“No, it isn’t Frank. I don’t think you know him,” she answered,
quietly, with her little-sisterly smile.
David was too thoroughly shaken and dazed to answer. He sat, in a
sort of sickness, trying to assimilate this new and amazing and most
disquieting truth. Here was a new element to fit in among all the
others--the child, the little tawny-headed girl of the family, cared
for some unknown man. An unreasoning hate for this man stirred in
David; he visualized a small and bowing Frenchman, titled perhaps,
captivating to these innocent, convent-bred eyes.
“And will there be a happy ending?” he asked.
The girl seemed suddenly to have gained self-possession and her old
serene spirit. She was smiling as she said:
“No. I think he likes another woman better than he likes me.”
“I can see that you don’t mean that,” David said, hurt and confused.
Gabrielle caring----! Gabrielle keeping this away from them all----! He
could not adjust himself to the thought of it easily, nor change all
his ideas to meet it. “Some day will you tell me?” he said, a little
uncertainly and clumsily, looking out upon what seemed suddenly a
brazen glare of sea and sky.
“Some day!” she answered, quietly. And there was a silence.
* * * * *
It was broken by a calling voice from above them, first like the pipe
of a gull, then resolving itself into a summons from Sarah. Gabrielle
and David got to their feet with disturbed glances; it was perhaps only
a caller, but Sarah sounded, as Gay said, scrambling briskly up the
cliff at his side, “important.”
Sarah looked important, too, and her face had the deep flush on one
side and the shiny paleness on the other that indicated an interrupted
nap. If they pleased, it was a man for Mr. Fleming.
“From Boston?” David said, as they accompanied the maid through the
garden.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“It may be the electric-light man,” Gabrielle suggested, yet with an
odd impending sense of something grave. Sarah quite obviously felt
this, too, for she added curiously, flutteringly: “He’s a queer, rough
sort of feller.”
“Where did you put him, Sarah?”
“He didn’t go in, Miss Gabrielle. He says he’d walk up and down
outside. There he is.”
And Sarah indicated a tall, lean young man who was indeed walking up
and down among the roses with long strides, and who now turned and came
toward them.
Gay saw a burned, dark, sick-looking face, deep black eyes, a good suit
that was somehow a little clumsy, on a tall figure that seemed a little
clumsy, too. The man lifted his hat as he came toward them, and smiled
under a curly thatch of very black, thick hair.
“Hello!” he said, in an oddly repressed sort of voice, holding out his
hand. Gay could only smile bewilderedly, but David sprang forward with
a sort of shout.
“Tom!” he said. “Tom Fleming! My God, you’ve come home!”