Her walk kept her out until five o’clock, and when she entered the house at that hour she found her mother-in-law in the front hall giving directions to Burrows.  At sight of Gabriella she paused breathlessly, and said with undisguised nervousness: 

“A very queer-looking person who says she was sent by your mother has just come to see you, dear—­a seamstress of some kind, I fancy.  As she looked quite clean, I let her go upstairs to the nursery to wait for you.  I hope you don’t mind.  She was so eager to see the baby.”

“Oh, it’s Miss Polly!” cried Gabriella; and without stopping to explain, she ran upstairs and into the nursery, where little Frances was cooing with delight in Miss Polly’s arms.

The seamstress’ small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her old lady’s bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight of Gabriella.  Even the grotesqueness of her appearance—­of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the ’seventies, of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag—­even these things could not extinguish the pleasure Gabriella felt in the meeting.  If Miss Polly was ridiculous at home, she was twice as ridiculous in New York, but somehow it did not seem to matter.  The sight of her brought happy tears to the girl’s eyes, and in the attempt to hide them, she buried her face in the warm, flower-scented neck of little Frances.

“She’s the peartest baby I ever saw,” remarked Miss Polly with pride.  “Wouldn’t yo’ ma dote on her?”

“Wouldn’t she?  But how did you leave mother and Jane and the children?  The baby must be a big boy now.”

“He’s runnin’ around all the time, and never out of mischief.  I never saw such a child for mischief.  I was tellin’ yo’ ma so last week.  There’s another baby on the way with Jane, you know.”

“How in the world will she take care of it?  I suppose Charley is just the same?”

“Well, if you ask me, Gabriella, I never was so dead set against Mr. Charley as the rest of you.  I helped raise Jane from the time she was no higher than that—­and I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against her except that Mr. Charley ain’t half as bad to my mind as she makes him out.  Some men respond to naggin’ and some don’t—­that’s what I said to her one day when she broke down and cried on my shoulder—­and you’ve got to be mighty particular when you begin to nag that you’re naggin’ the right sort.  But she won’t listen, not she.  ’If I don’t tell Charley of his faults, who’s goin’ to?’ she asks.  You know Jane always did talk pretty free to me ever since she was a little girl.  Well, there are some people that simply can’t stand bein’ told of their faults, and Mr. Charley is one of ’em.  It ain’t the kind of treatment that agrees with him, and if I’d been in Jane’s place, I reckon I’d have found it out long ago.  But it ain’t her way to learn anything—­you know that as well as I do.  She’s obliged to make the world over even if it drops to pieces in her hands.”