The streets were still white after the storm; piles of new-fallen snow lay in the gutters; and when Gabriella crossed Madison Avenue, the wind was so strong that it almost lifted her from the ground.  Above the shining whiteness of the streets there was a sky of spring; and spring was blossoming in the little cart of a flower vendor, which had stopped to let the traffic pass at the corner.  There were few people out of doors, and these few appeared remote and strangely unreal between the wintry earth and the April sky.  Beside the gutters, where the street cleaners were already at work, wagons drawn by large, heavy horses moved slowly from crossing to crossing.  At Forty-second Street the traffic was blocked by one of these wagons; and from the windows of the stage, which had stopped by the sidewalk, the eyes of the passengers stared with moody resignation at the hurrying pedestrians.  And it seemed to Gabriella that these faces wore, one and all, the look of secret anxiety, the faint network of lines which she had seen in the face of her mother-in-law.  “I wonder if I have it, too,” she thought, pausing before a shop window.  But her reflection flashed back at her from the glass, smooth, stern, unsmiling, as if her features had been sculptured in marble.

Below Fortieth Street there was the shop of a jeweller she sometimes went to with Mrs. Fowler in that lady’s despairing quest for suitable wedding presents at moderate prices; and something in the kindly, sympathetic face of the clerk who waited on them made Gabriella decide suddenly to trust him.  As she unwrapped the tissue paper rather nervously, and keeping back the necklace, laid the brooch and the bracelet on the square of purple velvet he spread out on the counter, she raised her eyes to his with a look that was childlike in its appeal.  Again she thought of the morning on which they had surreptitiously taken her silver mug, hidden in Mrs. Carr’s gray and black shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell.

“How much might I get for these?  I have worn them only a few times.  They do not suit me,” she said.

For a minute the clerk looked at her reflectively, but without curiosity; then lifting the trinkets from the square of velvet, he passed behind a green curtain into an adjoining room.  After a short absence, in which she nervously examined an assortment of travelling clocks, he came back and told her that they would give her four hundred and fifty dollars for the two pieces.

“The stones alone are worth that,” he added, “and, of course, they will have to be reset before we can sell them.”

“May I have the check now?”

“Shall we send it to you by mail?”

“No, I must have it now.  I want it this afternoon—­immediately.”