That there was any place in the South small enough not to afford temptation to George seemed improbable to Gabriella; but she felt that Mrs. Fowler’s earnest belief, supported as it was by the unshakable prop of maternal feeling, hardly justified the effort she must make to dispel it; and she had still no answer ready when the carriage turned into Fifty-seventh Street, and stopped beside the pavement where little Frances—­they had already begun to call her Fanny—­sat in a perambulator.  Flushed and smiling, with her red mouth gurgling delightedly, and a white wool lamb clasped in her arms, the adorable child was certainly worth any seesaw of destiny, any disillusioning experience of marriage.

Before the beginning of the next winter Gabriella’s second child was born—­a brown, sturdy boy, who came into the world with a frowning forehead and crying lustily from rage (so the nurse said) not from fright.  He was named Archibald after his grandfather, who developed immediately a passionate fondness for him.  His eyes were brown like the eyes of the Carrs, though by the time he was two years old, he was discovered to be painfully near-sighted, a weakness which Mrs. Carr, when she heard of it, insisted he must have inherited from his father’s side of the family.  He was not nearly so beautiful a baby as little Fanny had been; but he was from the very beginning a child of much character, strong, mutinous, utterly uncompromising in his attitude toward life.  When he was first put into shoes he fought with desperation, and surrendered at last, neither to persuasion nor to punishment, but to an exhaustion so profound that he slept for hours with his small protesting feet doubled under him and sobs of fury still bursting from his swollen lips.  The next day the struggle began again, and Mrs. Fowler remarked sympathetically: 

“You’ll never be able to break his will, Gabriella.  He is unmanageable.”

“I don’t want to break his will, mamma,” replied Gabriella, for she belonged to a less Scriptural generation, “but he must be disciplined, if it kills me.”  Pale, gentle, resolute, she waited for Archibald to surrender.  In the end she carried her point and won the adoring obedience of Archibald.  There was a magnanimous strain in him even at that age, Gabriella used to say, and though he fought to the bitter end, he bore no malice after he was once soundly defeated.

Long afterwards, when Gabriella looked back on the next few years of her life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous difference that the children had made.  All the rest was blotted out, a drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as “social duties,” moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating financial conditions in Wall Street.  There were extravagant winters and frugal winters; winters of large entertainments and winters of “women’s luncheons”; but always the summers shimmered green and peaceful against the blue background of the Virginia mountains.  The summers she loved even in memory; but of the winters she could recall but one glowing vision, and that was of Patty.  Though she had lost George, she had gained Patty, and it was impossible to deny that Patty might be compensation for almost any lack.