“Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me—­”

“Certainly she ought to go,” said Uncle Meriweather decisively.  “The less women and girls know about such matters, the better.  I don’t understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to Gabriella’s being present.”

“I didn’t consent, Uncle Meriweather,” protested poor Mrs. Carr, who could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; “I only said to Pussy that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she ought to, and I’m sure I’m not to blame for it.  If I’d had my way she would have been just as sheltered as other girls.”

“Don’t cry, mother, it isn’t your fault,” said Gabriella.  “Uncle Meriweather, if you make mother cry I’ll never forgive you.  How can she help all these dreadful things going on?”

She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet about it; but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did not budge an inch from her position.  With her clear grave eyes, which lost their sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of eager sympathy, she appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the room who was capable of facing the situation with frankness.  That she meant to face it to the end, Pussy could not doubt while she looked at her.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter about Gabriella.  She knows everything,” said Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.

“But she’s a young girl—­young girls oughtn’t to hear such things,” argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it.  Into his eyes, gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache—­the eyes of one who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his religion or the cut of his clothes—­there came the troubled look of one who is struggling against forces that he does not understand.  For Gabriella was serious.  There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.  Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for him.  He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught to recognize it from his childhood up.  It was pretty, it was playful; and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity, was fond of play.  But after the first perplexed minute or two he had relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.  Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of having just awakened from sleep.