Chapter Twelve: Intense Scrutiny

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

-Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

"Phil?" A clear, sweet voice broke into her reverie, and she started, spilling half her glass of champagne down her front.

"Drat," muttered Philippa, bending to scrub at the stain, with no other effect than that some of the liquid transferred itself to the glove she was using to mop up the liquid. However, she worked slowly, aware that Anne's eyes bored into her brown pompadour.

Finally Philippa had to give up and face her friend. "Yes, Queen Anne?"

Grey eyes locked brown, and held firmly. The "queen" was not amused. "You know exactly what I want to say."

"I do. But you won't say it, because you know I'm almost as loyal a friend to him as I am to you." Philippa tossed her head impatiently. "You can't tell me to stop staring. Anne, look at him for yourself."

To Phil's surprise, Anne did dare a quick glance—then turned her head away and down. Had she really seen Gilbert at all? Or had she, and was afraid of what she saw?

Before Phil could demand the answer to that question, Anne rose stiffly. If her pretty nose had been any further into the air, reflected Phil with grim amusement, Anne might have broken her neck. "I think," Anne said darkly, "I should like to go home now."

"I'll escort you back," eagerly offered Carlisle Cullen. Though Carlisle, who like Gilbert was a young medical student, was considered attractive and charming by every single girl at Redmond, tonight his departure was the least of Phil's chagrin with Anne.

Alone now, Philippa peered over the edges of her fan at her friend again. Goodness gracious, how was it even possible that he could look worse than before? Phil frowned. Perhaps it was her imagination playing tricks on her. True, Gilbert grew thinner and paler as the days passed, but one couldn't expect him to lose several more pounds in a matter of minutes. Or could one?

At least, she hoped Charlie was exaggerating. She might have gotten the chance to know for herself, had she been able to spend more than two days in Gilbert's company—out of the almost-a-month that had passed since he proposed to Anne.

Well. Philippa made a face. Maybe two days had been enough—for her, anyways. It had hurt to pace up and down the hallway outside the bedroom, with Charlie for company, and peer into the room hopefully only to see Gilbert sitting there, staring at the wall. He hadn't eaten or drank, or spoken, while Philippa "visited", and Charlie said he yelled in his sleep, yelled himself awake and then sat, very quietly, with tears streaming over the shadows deepening under his eyes, and onto his cheeks.

And it had hurt even more, to know that whatever pain she felt just staring at Gilbert was magnified a thousand times or more for him.

Phil had never seen anything this horrifying before…it was horrifying. What love could do to a person! And, yes, she was quite, quite sure it was love—True Love, in capital letters. It was too pure for obsession, too clear-cut for infatuation.

And who could not fall in love with Anne? She was, at least as far as Phil—and obviously Gilbert—was concerned, absolutely perfect: pretty, smart, clever, funny, good…and something else, something that Philippa didn't have a name for but which was defined by Anne's faerie countenance, her wispy imaginings, her graceful demeanor.

But more to the point, who could not fall in love with Gilbert? Granted, in both cases, these days falling in love was the given phrase for airy sighs and dinner outings, but Gilbert and Anne weren't like that. Who could not fall in love with Gilbert? Philippa had herself once admired him—until she found that he fancied Anne, and discreetly waited for it to become an established fact. Like Anne, Gilbert was out of the ordinary—surely he was more sensible than either Anne or Phil, but he could be and was as wistful as Anne when the situation required. Clearly, Gilbert and Anne were Meant To Be. Couldn't Anne see the way Gilbert smiled at her? Spoke to her? Looked at her?

If Alec or Alonzo had ever looked at Phil like that…

…she probably wouldn't have noticed, Philippa realized with a twinge of guilt. Silly spineless boys or not, they were something she'd taken for granted at home: Dolls, to be taken out of their tissue-lined boxes and played with, at her convenience.

And now…Philippa's full lips twisted in a grimace as she watched Gilbert, from whom Redmond's female population, aware that he and Anne were no longer on good terms, was rarely separated. He flirted—or tried, rather, but they ate it up.

It might have been more convincing if Philippa didn't know him—didn't know that this was Gilbert's way of floundering around in his Slough of Despond, without Help coming to the rescue. This was Gilbert trying to cope. He couldn't. And it hurt to see him try.

"It hurts to see him try," mused Charlie, approaching. It was an uncanny echo of Philippa's thoughts. "Doesn't it?"

"Mmm," said Philippa. "Half of them are still swooning over him, and half are convinced he's really a rake."

Charlie looked scandalized. "But you don't think so, do you? Even if he is flirting with half the school," he added, obviously embarrassed for Gilbert.

Philippa hastened to disabuse Charlie of that notion. "Oh, no! He's not really a rake, only a dear, make-believe rake. Gilbert Blythe is too genuinely good to be a real rake—but still, Charlie, it bothers me, and Anne too."