Gabriella had just crossed George’s will about something—­a mere trifle, something about calling on Florrie—­and he had turned to her with a look of hatred in his eyes, a kind of nervous, excitable hatred which she had never seen until then.  “Why does he look at me like that?” she had thought quite coldly; “and why should he have begun all of a sudden to hate me?  Why should my words, my voice, my gestures even, exasperate him so profoundly?  Of course he has stopped loving me, but why should that make him hate me?  I stopped loving him, too, long ago, yet there is only indifference, not hate, in my heart.”

“You must go about with me more, dear,” repeated Mrs. Fowler, in obedience to a vague but amiable instinct, which prompted her to shield George, to deceive Gabriella, to deny the truth of facts, to do anything on earth except acknowledge the actual situation in which she found herself.  “Don’t you think she ought to go about more, George?”

“I don’t care what she does,” returned George brutally, while his blue eyes squinted in the old charming way from which all charm had departed.  “I don’t care—­I don’t care—­” He checked himself, snapping his words in two with a virulent outburst of temper, and then, rising hurriedly, as his father entered the room, he left the table with his breakfast uneaten.

“He’s so nervous.  I can’t imagine what’s the matter.  I hope Burrows wasn’t in the pantry.  Did you say anything to hurt his feelings before you came down, Gabriella?” asked Mrs. Fowler, distractedly, with one eye on her daughter-in-law and the other on the pantry door, through which the discreet Burrows had disappeared at the opportune instant.

“No, I haven’t said anything that I can remember,” answered Gabriella with calmness.  It occurred to her that George’s behaviour was hardly that of a man whose “feelings” had been wounded, but she made no audible record of her reflection; “and of course I’ll go out with you if you want me to,” she added, for she felt sincerely sorry for her mother-in-law, even though she had ruined George in his infancy.  “I am going to the library to return a book, and we might pay some calls afterwards.”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” responded Mrs. Fowler, embarrassed, bewildered.  Was it possible, she asked herself, that Gabriella had not noticed George’s outrageous behaviour?

But Gabriella did not “go about” with her mother-in-law that season, for a higher will than Mrs. Fowler’s frustrated that lady’s benevolent intentions.  To a casual glance it would have seemed the merest accident which disturbed these felicitous plans, but such accidents, when Gabriella looked back on them afterwards, appeared to her to be woven into the very web and pattern of life.  It was plainly incredible that her whole existence should be changed merely because Archibald was naughty, as incredible as the idea that Destiny should have used so small a medium for the accomplishment of its tragic designs.