“It never occurred to me to ask,” replied Gabriella indifferently.  What did it matter to George where Florrie got her money?  But, then, George was always like that, and though he never made a penny himself, he was possessed of an insatiable curiosity about the amount and the sources of other people’s incomes.

“Well, it looks queer,” he observed with intense interest after a prolonged pause.  “That short pearl necklace she had on couldn’t have cost a cent under ten thousand dollars.”

“It was lovely.  I noticed how well the pearls matched,” replied his wife.  She was not in the least excited about the methods by which Florrie had obtained the necklace—­all that was a part of the miraculous way she got everything she wanted in life—­but she liked the pearls and she had envied Florrie while she looked at them.

A deep furrow had appeared between George’s eyebrows, and his mouth sagged suddenly at the corners, giving his face the ugly look Gabriella distrusted and dreaded.  While she watched him she recalled vaguely that she had once thought the latent brutality in his face an expression of power.  How young she had been when she married him!  How inconceivably ignorant!  Yet at twenty years she had imagined herself wise enough to judge a man.  She had deluded herself with the sanctified fallacy that mere instinct would guide her aright—­that her marriage would be protected from disaster by the infallible impulse which she had mistaken for love.

“I wonder,” said George with a suddenness that startled her out of her musing—­“I wonder if it can be Winston Camp!”

And Gabriella, who had forgotten Florrie, looked up to remark absentmindedly:  “Winston Camp?  You mean the man who dined here last winter and couldn’t eat anything but nuts?”

In the months that followed George did not mention Florrie again, and if he pursued his investigations into the obscure sources of her livelihood, his researches did not lead him back in the direction of Gabriella.  But, from the day of Florrie’s visit, it seemed to Gabriella, when she thought of it afterwards, his casual indifference began to develop into brutal neglect.  Not that she regretted his affection, or even his politeness, not that she cared in the least what his manner was—­this she made quite plain to herself—­but her passion to see life clearly, to test experience, to weigh events, brought her almost breathlessly round again to the question, “What does it mean?  Is there something hidden?  Am I still the poor abject fool that Jane was or am I beginning really to be myself?”

“You aren’t looking well, Gabriella,” said Mrs. Fowler at breakfast one morning when George, as she confided afterwards to Patty, had behaved unspeakably to his wife before his father came down.  “I want you to go about with me more, as you used to do before the children took up all your time.”