Again her impetuous spirit—­dangerous gift!—­flashed out recklessly in defence of the truth.

“Then why don’t you try to help your father, George?” she asked.  “He tells me that you rarely go down to the office.”  Her voice vibrated, but the stern lines of her mouth, which had lost its rich softness under the stress of her anger, hardly quivered.

His frown darkened to a scowl.  The calm disdain in her manner made him feel that he hated her, and he told himself stubbornly that if she had been gentler, if she had been more womanly, he would have done what she asked of him, forgetting in his rage that, if she had been these things, he would have found even less difficulty in refusing her.

“You know as well as I do that I can’t stand office work when I’m not fit,” he returned sullenly.  “It plays the devil with my nerves.”

Her case was hopeless.  If it had not been so in the beginning, she had ruined it by her irrefutable arguments, and while he rambled on moodily, making excuses for his neglect of business, she sat silently planning ways by which she might get the money for her mother.  To ask her father-in-law was, of course, out of the question; and Mrs. Fowler, beyond a miraculously extended credit, due probably to the shining bubble of her husband’s financial security, was as penniless as Gabriella.  Unless she could find something to sell there seemed little likelihood of securing four hundred dollars in a day.  It was imperative, then, that she should find something to sell; and remembering her mother’s tragic visits to old Mr. Camberwell, she ran hastily over her few personal possessions.  As her wedding gifts had been entirely in the form of clothes—­the donors doubtless surmising that the wife of a rich man’s son would have other gifts in abundance—­there remained only the trinkets George and George’s parents had given her.  All through luncheon, while Mrs. Fowler, with an assumed frivolity which Gabriella found more than usually depressing, rippled on over the warmed-over salmon, the girl mentally arranged and sorted in their cases a diamond brooch, an amethyst necklace, a bracelet set with pearls, and a topaz heart she occasionally wore on a gold chain, which she valued because it had belonged to her grandmother.  Once she stopped, and lifting her hand, looked appraisingly at her engagement ring for an instant, while Mrs. Fowler, observing her long gaze, remarked caressingly: 

“I always thought it an unusually pretty stone, my dear.  George knows a good deal about stones.”  Then, as if inspired by an impulse, she added quickly: 

“Wasn’t George upstairs before lunch?  I thought I heard his voice.”

“Yes, but he said he had an engagement at the club.”

“I wonder if he knows I have asked the Capertons to dinner to-night?  You know I got Florrie’s card the other day.  She is here on her wedding journey, but even then she doesn’t like to be quiet, for she is her mother all over again.  I used to know Bessie very well.  Kind hearted, but a little vulgar.”